In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 5450 2GB.

The HD 5450 has a 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5450. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 3.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 5450. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5450 has a 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 4 more Render Output Units than the HD 5450. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 1.7 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 5450. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 5450 was released over a year more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the HD 5450 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 8600 GT.

The HD 5450 has 1536 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the 8600 GT has superior memory performance.

The 8600 GT has 16 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5450, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is slightly better than the HD 5450.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5450 2GB has 80. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5450 is 52. The HD 5450 having 9 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 5450 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the HD 5450 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5450 2GB requires 40 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5450. The 8600 GT requires 6 Watts more than the HD 5450 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the 8600 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the HD 5450.