Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (80%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5670, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB is quite a bit (more or less 61%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9500 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB is quite a bit (more or less 61%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5670, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (61%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.