Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features core speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M390X should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be a lot (approximately 77%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40344 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64 (0%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.