Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features GPU core speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 78% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (more or less 80%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (more or less 100%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M270X, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (100%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.