Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (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 (about 80%) more effective at anisotropic 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the Radeon R9 M270X, by far. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.