Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 993 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5450, which comes with core speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.