Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 is 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 4790 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (more or less 133%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (33%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.