Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB has a GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 975 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 4890 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 4890 1GB	Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Apr 2, 2009	September 23, 2009
Code Name	RV790 XT	Cypress XT
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	1000 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	975 MHz	1200 MHz
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units	40	80
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	190 watts	188 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	124800 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	40000 Mtexels/sec	68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16000 Mpixels/sec	27200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.