Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (more or less 186%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83200 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (300%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.