Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a clock frequency of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 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 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 448000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is quite a bit (more or less 443%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 198400 (443%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (approximately 375%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (375%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.