Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (approximately 89%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39680 (89%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (approximately 120%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (120%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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