Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (about 79%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (about 28%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (28%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.