Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which has core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 1963% faster than the Radeon HD 5450 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (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

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (about 1038%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5450, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.