Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be just a bit (approximately 10%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (55%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.