Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (900%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (approximately 1660%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79680 (1660%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (approximately 1073%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25760 (1073%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.