Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB uses a 55 nm design. ATi has set the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 993 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, 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 4850 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 4850 512MB	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Jun 25, 2008	March 2012
Code Name	RV770 PRO	Pitcairn Pro
Fab Process	55 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	512 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	625 MHz	860 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	993 MHz (1986 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1024
Texture Mapping Units	40	64
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	110 watts	130 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	63552 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	25000 Mtexels/sec	55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10000 Mpixels/sec	27520 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.