GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5450, which has GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 80(16x5) SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (350%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be quite a bit (more or less 300%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be quite a bit (more or less 300%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5450, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7800 (300%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.