Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (889%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 1100% quicker than the Radeon HD 5450 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (about 1208%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62800 (1208%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.