Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (approximately 100%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52296 (100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (about 29%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6656 (29%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one 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. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.