Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (more or less 172%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33000 (172%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (142%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.