Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 570

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 570, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1168 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 570		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 570 will be 79% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 570		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 101376 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 570 is a lot (approximately 186%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 570		149504 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97304 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 570 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 570		37376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14176 (61%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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