Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be just a bit (approximately 4%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (approximately 24%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (24%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.