Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The Radeon HD 5830 makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5830 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5830	Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	February 25, 2010	September 23, 2009
Code Name	Cypress LE	Cypress XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	800 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	1200 MHz
Unified Shaders	1120(224x5)	1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units	56	80
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	175 watts	188 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	44800 Mtexels/sec	68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12800 Mpixels/sec	27200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.