Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB uses a 55 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 4870 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5830 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 4870 512MB	Radeon HD 5830
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Jun 25, 2008	February 25, 2010
Code Name	RV770 XT	Cypress LE
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	750 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	900 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1120(224x5)
Texture Mapping Units	40	56
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	175 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	115200 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	30000 Mtexels/sec	44800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12000 Mpixels/sec	12800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.