Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 269 Watts (1076%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 4733%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 227200 (4733%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 90400 (3767%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.