Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (more or less 443%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.