Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon HD 5750 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5750 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1150 MHz on this particular card. It features 720(144x5) SPUs along with 36 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5750 1GB		86 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5750 1GB should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5750 1GB		73600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 10048 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5750 1GB is a small bit (about 1%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5750 1GB		25200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5750 1GB is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5750 1GB		11200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (12%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.