Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific model. 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 277%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (about 403%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4730, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.