Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB features a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 975 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 32 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 4890 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

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

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 4890 2GB	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Apr 2, 2009	September 30, 2009
Code Name	RV790 XT	Cypress PRO
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	2048 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	1000 MHz	725 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	975 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units	40	72
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	190 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	124800 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	40000 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16000 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.