GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (more or less 259%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49040 (259%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8240 (43%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 max fill rate.