GeForce 825M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 825M should be 13% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 825M		14400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 825M should be quite a bit (more or less 55%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 825M		13600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (55%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 825M is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by far. (explain)

GeForce 825M		6800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (55%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.