Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is 178% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (approximately 214%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (357%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.