Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which features clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 32 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is much (approximately 102%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18800 (102%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (about 170%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15600 (170%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.