In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 550M 2GB are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7450M.

The GT 550M has a 40 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 7450M. This results in the GT 550M providing 6.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 40 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 7450M and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GT 550M providing 0.2 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 7450M was released over a year more recently than the GT 550M, and so the Radeon HD 7450M is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GT 550M.

The GT 550M has 1024 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 7450M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GT 550M also has superior memory performance overall.

The GT 550M has 14.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 7450M, which means that the memory performance of the GT 550M is slightly better than the Radeon HD 7450M.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7450M has 160. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 550M is 142 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7450M is 56. The GT 550M having 86 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 550M delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 7450M.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 7450M requires 7 Watts. The GT 550M requires 28 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7450M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 550M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 7450M.