Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (133%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 101504 (383%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is a lot (approximately 319%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34112 (319%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a little bit (about 20%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2112 (20%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. 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 faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.