Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be much (more or less 23%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10240 (23%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14720 (115%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant 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.