ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 vs ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430

Due to the similar clock rate, the 3D gaming performance should be on one level with the HD 4570 (predecessor with same TDP range). Therefore, all current games should be playable in low-medium details. Demanding games, like Crysis, NFS Shift, or Modern Warfare ran on the HD 4570 for example only in low detail settings fluently. Less demanding games like Left 4 Dead should run in high detail settings.

The memory interface of the Mobility 5470 is composed out of one 64 bit wide controller that can access (G)DDR2 or (G)DDR3. If DDR2 is used by the laptop vendor the performance might be a bit worse.

The HD5450 offers only 80 MADD cores (called Stream Processors) which are grouped in 16 5-dimensional groups. The cores support DirectX 11 functions in hardware (Tessellation, OIT, Post-Processing, Shadows, HDR Texture Compression).  Compared to the HD 5600/5700 series which feature 400 cores, the core count of the HD5400 series is clearly cut down leading to a reduced computation power of 108 versus 360-520 (HD 5650) GigaFLOPs. Due to the high clock speed of the chip, the gap is not that big.

According to AMD, the HD 5000 series was also improved regarding general computing (as the HD4000 series was not optimized for this). Therefore, the performance of ATI stream, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 11 applications should be noticable better.

The Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series includes an improved video processor (UVD2) to decode HD videos with the graphic card. The new version is able to decode two HD streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray picture in picture) if the graphic card offers enough memory bandwidth (which may not be the case for the HD 5450). Since the Flash 10.1 Beta, the 5000 series is also able to help accelerate Flash HD videos (like YouTube).

A special feature of the HD 5000 series is its ability to transmit HD audio formats (like Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio) with up to 8 channels and 192 KHz / 24 Bit over HDMI 1.3a.

As the desktop HD 5000 series, the Mobility HD 5450 also supports Eyefinity to connect up to 4 monitors to the graphics chip. Of course, this depends on how many monitor outputs the laptop vendor adds to the laptop (and how they are wired). Most laptops will support three screens simultaneously (internal and two external).

The power consumption of the HD 5450 is a bit better than the 4570 / 5470 (both 13-15 W) and therefore the HD5450 can also be used for small laptops. According to AMD, the performance per watt ratio (same power consumption, better performance) and the Idle power consumption were improved (thanks to Memory Clock Scaling and Clock Gating). Furthermore, the chip does support PowerXpress (with AMD chipset) and Switchable Graphics (Intel) to switch between the dedicated and chipset / CPU graphics card (with improved switching times).