Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44800 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (100%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.