Radeon HD 4830 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (111%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be quite a bit (about 283%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52000 (283%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16400 (178%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.