Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 is 33% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is much (about 25%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.