Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 149 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 150% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is much (more or less 145%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75800 (145%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28000 (121%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.