Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1120 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870 should in theory perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a small bit (approximately 13%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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, HDR 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 amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.