Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 should be 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (approximately 70%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (106%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 are applied per second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.