Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be a little bit (approximately 12%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (12%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB should be a lot (approximately 25%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.