Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit (more or less 38%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (24%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number 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 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 record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.