Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, 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 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be a lot (approximately 72%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37400 (72%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be a bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.