ATI Radeon X1300 vs X1550 DDR2 HyperMemory

Since two cards have the same number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs), and the ATI Radeon X1550 DDR2 HyperMemory graphics unit is clocked higher, it also has higher pixel fillrate. Better maximum pixel fill rate means that the GPU can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless the graphics card is limited by something else, such as memory bandwidth or texture mapping.

Another important parameter, that affects overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to the number of TMUs and graphics clock speed. The Radeon X1550 DDR2 HyperMemory has an edge here, because it operates at higher frequency, and both GPUs have identical number of Texture Mapping Units. Better texture fill rate allows the graphics card to utilize more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and memory interface width all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the ATI Radeon X1550 DDR2 HyperMemory GPU is due to higher clocked memory.