Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB uses a 55 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 900 MHz on this model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, 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 4870 1GB 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 4870 1GB	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Jun 25, 2008	September 30, 2009
Code Name	RV770 XT	Cypress PRO
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	750 MHz	725 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	900 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)	150 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	115200 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	30000 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12000 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.