Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features clock speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be much (about 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40344 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the Radeon R9 M390X, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64 (0%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.