Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 160 SPUs as well as 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) 1GB		31 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 319 Watts (1029%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be a lot (more or less 900%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		6000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54000 (900%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much (more or less 700%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		3000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21000 (700%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.