Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (426%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5450 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (about 1208%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62800 (1208%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (approximately 946%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5450, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24600 (946%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.