GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5450, which features core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general, because of its greater 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 (about 408%) more effective at anisotropic 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

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is the winner, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.