GeForce 840M vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
GeForce 840M		30 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 840M should be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M is a lot (more or less 415%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19896 (415%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 840M should be much (about 243%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5832 (243%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.