Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M390X will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be much (approximately 77%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40344 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a little bit (more or less 0%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M390X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64 (0%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.