GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5450, which has a GPU core clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 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 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 178 Watts (937%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is quite a bit (about 1377%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71600 (1377%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a lot (approximately 638%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5450, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16600 (638%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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.