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Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB has clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB 150 Watts
Radeon HD 7990 375 Watts
Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 will be 400% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990 576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB 115200 MB/sec
Difference: 460800 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (more or less 711%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990 243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB 30000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 213200 (711%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (more or less 407%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990 60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB 12000 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 48800 (407%)

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

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Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7990

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 4870 512MB Radeon HD 7990
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year Jun 25, 2008 April 2013
Code Name RV770 XT Malta
Memory 512 MB 3072 MB (x2)
Core Speed 750 MHz 950 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 3600 MHz 6000 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 150 watts 375 watts
Bandwidth 115200 MB/sec 576000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 30000 Mtexels/sec 243200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 12000 Mpixels/sec 60800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 800(160x5) 2048 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 40 128 (x2)
Render Output Units 16 32 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 384-bit (x2)
Fab Process 55 nm 28 nm
Transistors 956 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number 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 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7990

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.

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