Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (113%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5670 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (about 255%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39540 (255%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (more or less 344%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5670, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21320 (344%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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