Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 is 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (about 30%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15800 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a little bit (about 17%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (17%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 get to the maximum fill rate.