Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 380X, which has GPU core speed of 970 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380X is 43% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be much (more or less 138%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71960 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7840 (34%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.