Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 460, which features clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number 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 amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.