Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 269 Watts (1076%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 1900% faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 4733%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 227200 (4733%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of 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 the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.