Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a core clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 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 a lot (approximately 23%) better at 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 using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, and very much so. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.