Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 is 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (more or less 30%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15800 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a bit (about 17%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (17%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.