Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 78% faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (more or less 80%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (80%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (100%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.