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Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 features a GPU core speed of 850 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory is set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with GPU 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (approximately 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, though 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

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