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Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5550 features a clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550 12800 MB/sec
Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (approximately 525%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550 8800 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 46240 (525%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850 27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550 4400 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 23120 (525%)

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

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Radeon HD 5550

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5550 Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year February 9, 2010 March 2012
Code Name Redwood LE Pitcairn Pro
Memory 512 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 550 MHz 860 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) (Unknown) watts 130 watts
Bandwidth 12800 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 8800 Mtexels/sec 55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 4400 Mpixels/sec 27520 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 320(64x5) 1024
Texture Mapping Units 16 64
Render Output Units 8 32
Bus Type DDR2 GDDR5
Bus Width 128-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 627 million 2800 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5550

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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