Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 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 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (about 109%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (109%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (more or less 132%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (132%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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.