Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M230, which has a GPU core clock speed of 780 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R5 M230, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 is much (approximately 225%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (225%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M230 is superior to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 720 (30%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

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