Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which features core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is a lot (about 69%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (69%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be much (about 69%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5450, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (69%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 max fill rate.