GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 be much faster than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (approximately 175%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a lot (approximately 22%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM), and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 amount 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 number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.