Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (900%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 1660%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79680 (1660%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25760 (1073%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.