Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 560, which features a core clock frequency of 1175 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 is 12% faster than the Radeon RX 560 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 13312 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 560 should be quite a bit (more or less 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23000 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (23%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.