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Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 comes with core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which has core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
Radeon HD 6990 375 Watts
Difference: 224 Watts (148%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990 320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 205%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990 159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 107160 (205%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990 53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 29920 (129%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6990

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 6990
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 30, 2009 March 2011
Code Name Cypress PRO Antilles
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB (x2)
Core Speed 725 MHz 830 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 5000 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 375 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 52200 Mtexels/sec 159360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23200 Mpixels/sec 53120 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1440(288x5) 1536 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 72 96 (x2)
Render Output Units 32 32 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit (x2)
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 2154 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6990

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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