Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 70848 (111%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot (about 34%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8600 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be quite a bit (more or less 34%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3440 (34%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface 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 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.