Radeon HD 4350 vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4550 256MB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4350 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4550 256MB will be a small bit (more or less 4%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4550 256MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4350, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 100 (4%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.