GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 160 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) is a lot (more or less 39%) better at AF than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 700 (39%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.