Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5450, which features GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 will be a small bit (approximately 8%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (8%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 will be just a bit (about 8%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 200 (8%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.