Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which has core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (568%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be much (approximately 615%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (615%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22200 (854%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.