Radeon HD 4650 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 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 4650 512MB		55 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (218%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (about 133%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (167%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.