Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 460, which features a clock speed of 1090 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (101%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 14% quicker than the Radeon RX 460 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 will be a little bit (more or less 17%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8840 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5760 (33%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.