Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5770, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 will be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 13248 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 is a lot (more or less 36%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (36%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.