Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.