In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7690M XT are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 550M 2GB.

The GT 550M has a 15 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7690M XT, but the HD 7690M XT has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 550M. As a result, the HD 7690M XT exhibits a 5.6 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 15 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7690M XT, but the HD 7690M XT has 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 550M. As a result, the HD 7690M XT exhibits a 2.8 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 HD 7690M XT was released over a year more recently than the GT 550M, and so the HD 7690M XT 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 HD 7690M XT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 7690M XT has superior memory performance.

The HD 7690M XT has 28.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 550M, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7690M XT is slightly better than the GT 550M.

The GeForce GT 550M 2GB has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7690M XT has 480. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 550M is 142 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7690M XT is 174. The HD 7690M XT having 32 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7690M XT delivers a noticeably 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 7690M XT requires 25 Watts. The GT 550M requires 10 Watts more than the HD 7690M XT 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 HD 7690M XT.