Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 106% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 136000 (106%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (approximately 127%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66200 (127%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (28%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.