Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 240, which comes with a clock frequency of 730 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (403%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 240 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (about 258%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37600 (258%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (approximately 297%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R7 240, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17360 (297%)

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 transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.