Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which features core speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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

The Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (more or less 256%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.