GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all of that 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 8500 GT		45 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (137%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 will be quite a bit (about 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 should be much (approximately 44%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (44%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of 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.