Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is quite a bit (about 61%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.