Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 800 MHz on this model. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (242%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be much (about 148%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (148%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB will be a lot (more or less 396%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9900 (396%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.