Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 360, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1625 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 768 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 is 23% faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a small bit (about 4%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R7 360. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (38%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video 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 amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.