Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 285 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (more or less 97%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50616 (97%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a lot (about 27%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6176 (27%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.