Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 730 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (403%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 344% faster than the Radeon R7 240 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (more or less 258%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37600 (258%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17360 (297%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.