Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon VII

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 frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon VII, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1400 MHz, and 16384 MB of HBM2 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 4096-bit bus. It also is comprised of 3840 SPUs, 240 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.