GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 160 Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) is a lot (approximately 39%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (39%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) is much (more or less 39%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 700 (39%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.