GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (approximately 175%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33240 (175%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GT 450 (OEM), and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4240 (22%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.