Radeon HD 5570 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (195%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (approximately 186%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24200 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19600 (377%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 per second.

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