Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should be 206% faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (206%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (approximately 359%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66080 (359%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18960 (206%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 most 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.