Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1400 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon R9 270, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is much (more or less 38%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a lot (about 24%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.