Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 features a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with a core clock frequency of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 800 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6790 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 6790
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	September 30, 2009	April 2011
Code Name	Cypress PRO	Barts LE
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz	840 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	1440(288x5)	800
Texture Mapping Units	72	40
Render Output Units	32	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	151 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	52200 Mtexels/sec	33600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	23200 Mpixels/sec	13440 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.