Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5770 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (approximately 54%) better at 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 should be quite a bit (about 71%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5770, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over 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 it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.