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Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 58 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (about 24%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12960 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 5870

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Radeon HD 7850

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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 5870	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	September 23, 2009	March 2012
Code Name	Cypress XT	Pitcairn Pro
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	850 MHz	860 MHz
Memory Speed	4800 MHz	4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	188 watts	130 watts
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	68000 Mtexels/sec	55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27200 Mpixels/sec	27520 Mpixels/sec
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
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Transistors	2154 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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

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