GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all 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 RAM. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		47 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 will be 75% quicker than the Radeon HD 5450 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 will be much (more or less 66%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3440 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1720 (66%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.