Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which features a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 231 Watts (1216%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 1525%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79280 (1525%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 983%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5450, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25560 (983%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.