Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (more or less 133%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59696 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (about 133%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17056 (133%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.