Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which features GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (about 133%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59696 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17056 (133%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.