GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 540 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5450, which comes with GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 80(16x5) SPUs, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.