Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which has clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (more or less 111%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44480 (111%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (76%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at 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 write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.