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Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 975 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 111%) faster with regards to 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 running with lots of anti-aliasing 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

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Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 4890 1GB Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year Apr 2, 2009 December 2010
Code Name RV790 XT Cayman XT
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 1000 MHz 880 MHz
Memory Speed 3900 MHz 5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 190 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 124800 MB/sec 176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 40000 Mtexels/sec 84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 16000 Mpixels/sec 28160 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 800(160x5) 1536
Texture Mapping Units 40 96
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 55 nm 40 nm
Transistors 959 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices

Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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