Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with GPU core speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com

Radeon HD 7850 Amazon.com

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

Model	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	September 23, 2009	March 2012
Code Name	Cypress XT	Pitcairn Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	850 MHz	860 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1600(320x5)	1024
Texture Mapping Units	80	64
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	188 watts	130 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	68000 Mtexels/sec	55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27200 Mpixels/sec	27520 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.