Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (101%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 14% faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB should be a bit (about 17%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8840 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5760 (33%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.