Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is a little bit (more or less 7%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (7%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (more or less 45%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7790, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (45%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.