Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be a lot (approximately 49%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is just a bit (more or less 7%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.