In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6830M are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 550M 2GB.

The GT 550M has a 165 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 6830M, but the Radeon HD 6830M has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 550M. As a result, the Radeon HD 6830M exhibits a 11.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GT 550M. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 550M has a 165 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 6830M, but the Radeon HD 6830M has 12 more Render Output Units than the GT 550M. As a result, the Radeon HD 6830M exhibits a 6.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 550M. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 550M was released less than a year after the Radeon HD 6830M, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB and the Radeon HD 6830M have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GT 550M has 3.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 6830M, which means that the memory performance of the GT 550M is marginally better than the Radeon HD 6830M.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6830M has 800. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 550M is 142 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6830M is 230. The Radeon HD 6830M having 88 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 6830M delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 550M.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6830M requires 39 Watts. The Radeon HD 6830M requires 4 Watts more than the GT 550M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 6830M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 550M.