Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 181 Watts (953%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (about 1254%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65200 (1254%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23000 (885%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.