Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 199 Watts (209%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 198400 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (approximately 1161%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 213600 (1161%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 83600 (909%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.