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Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which features a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850 127 Watts
Radeon HD 5870 188 Watts
Difference: 61 Watts (48%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (approximately 83%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850 37200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 30800 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850 24800 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 2400 (10%)

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 5870

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 6850

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 5870 Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 23, 2009 October 2010
Code Name Cypress XT Barts Pro
Memory 1024 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 850 MHz 775 MHz
Memory Speed 4800 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 188 watts 127 watts
Bandwidth 153600 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 68000 Mtexels/sec 37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 27200 Mpixels/sec 24800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1600(320x5) 960
Texture Mapping Units 80 48
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 2154 million 1700 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6850

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

One Response to “Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6850”
ATI Radeon vs Nvidia GT! Which is the best for 10.8.1 ML? says:

[...] for 10.8.1 ML? I've got the v1 Asus EAH5870, works Out of Box. A bit powerful than EAH6850. See there.  OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1 : Mac Pro 3.1, DSDT. Asus Maximus V Gene, i7 3770, Asus HD [...]

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