Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 will be 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is quite a bit (more or less 23%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10240 (23%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be much (approximately 115%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14720 (115%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high 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 number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.