Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 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 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 181 Watts (953%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much (more or less 1254%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65200 (1254%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23000 (885%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.