Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (568%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be much (approximately 615%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (615%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22200 (854%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.