Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (about 40%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (7%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics 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 amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few 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.