Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X should be 125% faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is much (approximately 143%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64000 (143%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (113%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.