GeForce 930M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM runs at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 930M will be 13% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M will be a lot (approximately 153%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13472 (153%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 930M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3024 (69%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.