Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 480 should be 105% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134144 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (about 209%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109080 (209%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12640 (54%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.