Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 319 Watts (1029%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 217600 (1700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be a lot (about 1100%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55000 (1100%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21500 (860%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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