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Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850 130 Watts
Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
Difference: 21 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be a bit better than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be just a bit (more or less 5%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 2840 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 4320 (19%)

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

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 30, 2009 March 2012
Code Name Cypress PRO Pitcairn Pro
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 725 MHz 860 MHz
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 130 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 52200 Mtexels/sec 55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23200 Mpixels/sec 27520 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1440(288x5) 1024
Texture Mapping Units 72 64
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2154 million 2800 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Comments

3 Responses to “Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7850”
GPU Upgrade - Need Suggestions! says:

[...] better performer as well as a better overclocker (if you overclock ofcourse). Check out this link- Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7850 – Performance Comparison Benchmarks @ Hardware Compare Please note that it is completely theoretical and the real world performance may differ. Also [...]

Terrence says:

Hey Im looking at possibly upgrading my video card in couple of months.
I currently have radeon hd 5850 and was wondering whats the main difference when cards say core speed and memory speed?
I see cheaper cards on the market have the same core speed but are DDR2 instead of 3.

larsV12 says:

@Terrence .. core (clock) speed like any of the other measures of performance in gfx cards is all relative. You mention lesser cards having "the same core speed" .. and that's actually incorrect across each generation iteration of DDR & GDDR vRAM types. That's to say, a gfx card with 1GB of DDR2 vRAM will essentially perform no better than a card with 512MB's of GDDR3 vRAM. You see, the premise being that each generation of DDR roughly doubles the speed of the generation before. So, put another way, 1 GB of GDDR3 will perform at only half the speed of 1 GB of GDDR5. So, it's like this, DDR2 & DDR3?? Forget it .. they're yesterday's tech' - and a complete waste of time even thinking about (let alone discussing). If you're after a budget upgrade in the RED corner, i'd advise a HD6950 2GB - or better still a 6970, at the very least. If you're looking at the GREEN team, consider at least a GTX 480 or GTX 580. As all of those cards are getting relatively old now (but each still supporting DX 11 & all having GDDR5 vRAM), you should be able to pick up a bargain from either the GREEN or RED Team on any one of those cards i've named 😉

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