Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be 50% faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit (about 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.