Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which has GPU clock speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (168%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 518400 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (about 986%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 220800 (986%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55200 (986%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.