Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which has GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (about 127%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by a large margin. (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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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