GeForce 840M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 840M, in theory, should perform quite a bit 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 is quite a bit (more or less 181%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 840M is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.