Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R5 M230, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 780 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R5 M230 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be quite a bit (more or less 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be quite a bit (more or less 41%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R5 M230, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1280 (41%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.