Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 360, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this specific model. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 23% faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a little bit (approximately 4%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 360. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be much (more or less 38%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R7 360, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (38%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.