Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a lot (approximately 214%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (357%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.