Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs 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 along with 96 TAUs 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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 89%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (approximately 120%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.