Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 88% faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (approximately 133%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, 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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.