Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which features GPU core speed of 970 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 380 2G should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G should be quite a bit (about 108%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56440 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7840 (34%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its 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 core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.