Radeon HD 4830 1GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 199 Watts (209%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 198400 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 1161%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 213600 (1161%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.