Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator 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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should be a lot 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 should be a little bit (approximately 7%) better at anisotropic 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 (about 45%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7790, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.