Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5870 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (about 52%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (113%)

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 worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.