Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 344%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 179800 (344%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (about 300%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69600 (300%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.