Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (700%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 1150% faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (approximately 1367%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65600 (1367%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (more or less 967%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (967%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.