Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 260X, which features clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be a little bit (about 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 a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the Radeon R7 260X, 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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.