Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which comes with GPU clock speed of 970 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 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 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 380 4G should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (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 (more or less 108%) faster with regards to 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 much (more or less 34%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.