Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 132 Watts (695%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (about 904%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47000 (904%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20600 (792%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.