Radeon HD 4350 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 228 Watts (1036%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4350 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (3200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (more or less 2474%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113800 (2474%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4350, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27300 (1187%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.