Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 7850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.