Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 285, which features a clock speed of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be much (about 130%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58016 (130%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16576 (130%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.