Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 5770 makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features 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 features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Radeon HD 5770 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 5770	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	October 13, 2009	March 2012
Code Name	Juniper 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	800(160x5)	1024
Texture Mapping Units	40	64
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	108 watts	130 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	76800 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	34000 Mtexels/sec	55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	13600 Mpixels/sec	27520 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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