Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (206%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (approximately 277%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62080 (277%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22560 (403%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its 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 the core 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.