Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 102 Watts (408%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6850 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is much (more or less 675%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32400 (675%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (933%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip 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 Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.