Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 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 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (about 34%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (88%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one 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 this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.