Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (206%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (approximately 359%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66080 (359%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18960 (206%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.