Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M295X, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M295X is 38% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X will be a lot (about 84%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43800 (84%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X should be a bit (more or less 3%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.