Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with GPU core speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 48896 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 69%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.