Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X should be 125% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be much (more or less 108%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56600 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (17%)

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 moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface 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 bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.