Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 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 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390X 8G should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (approximately 254%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132600 (254%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (190%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.