Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 has a GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 are 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.