Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5850 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (approximately 54%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is quite a bit (about 71%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5770, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (71%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.