Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1400 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is quite a bit (more or less 61%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be much (more or less 125%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 5830, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.