Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which features a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (about 53%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27800 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (38%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface 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 bandwidth is, the better 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one 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. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.