Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which has GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 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 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (168%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 262400 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (approximately 611%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 136960 (611%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47520 (849%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.