ATI Radeon HD 6450 GDDR3 vs MSI Radeon HD 4670 1 GB (R4670-2D1G/D3)

With twice as many ROPs, or Raster Operations Pipelines, and higher graphics clock speed, the MSI Radeon HD 4670 1 GB offers considerably better pixel fill rate. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

There are two characteristics that influence the maximum texture fillrate. They are the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics frequency. The Radeon HD 4670 1 GB has a massive advantage in this area, because it has 4 times as many TMUs and operates at higher rate. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU to utilize more complex 3D effects and/or map more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, illustrates how fast the graphics card is at executing applications, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. Generally, the more CUDA cores or stream processors the graphics card has, and the the faster they operate at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The MSI Radeon HD 4670 1 GB has an edge here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the GPUs store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the MSI Radeon HD 4670 1 GB is a result of higher clocked memory and wider bus.