Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 960 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 102 Watts (408%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 675%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32400 (675%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.