Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which features a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	September 30, 2009	September 23, 2009
Code Name	Cypress PRO	Cypress XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	1200 MHz
Unified Shaders	1440(288x5)	1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units	72	80
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	151 watts	188 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	52200 Mtexels/sec	68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	23200 Mpixels/sec	27200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.