Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 164 Watts (126%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 67% quicker than the Radeon HD 7850 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 322%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 176960 (322%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 65280 (237%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.