Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 100% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 344%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 179800 (344%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69600 (300%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.