Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 136000 (106%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 164%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73600 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (more or less 131%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (131%)

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 (counted 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 the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 max fill rate.