Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which has core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 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 R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 36 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 23% quicker than the Radeon R7 260X overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is just a bit (approximately 18%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (32%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.