Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 112448 (177%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 238%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59480 (238%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 182%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18160 (182%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.