Radeon HD 5450 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 231 Watts (1216%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 is 1275% faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (more or less 1525%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79280 (1525%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 5450, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25560 (983%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.