Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be quite a bit 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 AF 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

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, by a large margin. (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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.