Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which has a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 160 SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be a lot (approximately 47%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		6000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		3000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (47%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.