Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which features clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 4G will be 43% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is much (approximately 108%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56440 (108%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be a lot (approximately 34%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 speed of the chip. The better 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.