Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 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 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 is 38% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (about 89%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39680 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (120%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.