GeForce 840M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 840M should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M should be much (about 181%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15896 (181%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 840M is a lot (about 87%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3832 (87%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.