Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which has clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be a lot (more or less 76%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be quite a bit (about 76%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1900 (76%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.