Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which has a clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised 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 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 256%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 114560 (256%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (about 315%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40320 (315%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of 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 amount 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.