Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which features a clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 356 Watts (1874%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 307200 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 2965%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 154160 (2965%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 1943%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5450, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50520 (1943%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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 max fill rate.