Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 is 122% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (more or less 66%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (approximately 343%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4730, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (343%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.