Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5770, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5770 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 13248 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 should be quite a bit (approximately 36%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (36%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.