GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5450, which has core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) 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 5450		19 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (342%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 5450 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is much (approximately 408%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (408%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be a lot (about 154%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5450, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (154%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.