GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5450, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 650 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) will be a lot (more or less 66%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3440 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.