Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 Nano

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 Nano, which has a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a HBM memory frequency of 500 MHz. It also features a 4096-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 4096 SPUs, 256 Texture Address Units, and 64 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 Nano		175 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 Nano should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		512000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 384000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 Nano should be quite a bit (approximately 390%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		256000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 203800 (390%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 Nano is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40800 (176%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.