Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 is 206% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (more or less 277%) faster with regards to AF 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 quite a bit (more or less 403%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4730, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.