Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 206400 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (about 429%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 96000 (429%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (429%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.