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Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 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 5850 151 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 200 Watts
Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a lot (about 72%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 37400 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 2400 (10%)

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

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7950

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 7950
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 30, 2009 January 2012
Code Name Cypress PRO Tahiti Pro
Memory 1024 MB 1536 MB
Core Speed 725 MHz 800 MHz
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 200 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 240000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 52200 Mtexels/sec 89600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23200 Mpixels/sec 25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1440(288x5) 1792
Texture Mapping Units 72 112
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 384-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2154 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7950

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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