Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (111%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be 317% quicker than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be quite a bit (about 387%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (387%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16400 (178%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.