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Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 175 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB 190 Watts
Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB 124800 MB/sec
Difference: 28800 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (approximately 100%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB 40000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 40000 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB 16000 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 16000 (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

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Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 4890 1GB Radeon HD 7870
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year Apr 2, 2009 March 2012
Code Name RV790 XT Pitcairn XT
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 1000 MHz 1000 MHz
Memory Speed 3900 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 190 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 124800 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 40000 Mtexels/sec 80000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 16000 Mpixels/sec 32000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 800(160x5) 1280
Texture Mapping Units 40 80
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 55 nm 28 nm
Transistors 959 million 2800 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices

Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Comments

One Response to “Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 7870”
Allen750 says:

Thanks for the chart.

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