Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 will be 38% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 48896 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (approximately 69%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8160 (41%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.