Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5450, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 650 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 800 MHz on this particular model. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (295%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should be 314% quicker than the Radeon HD 5450 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 40192 (314%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB is quite a bit (about 106%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5488 (106%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8088 (311%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.