Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (about 30%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15800 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a little bit (more or less 17%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (17%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 reach the maximum fill rate.