Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 231 Watts (1216%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 2177%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113200 (2177%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27000 (1038%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.