Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a lot (approximately 31%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12200 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (approximately 45%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (45%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.