Radeon HD 4650 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with core 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 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		55 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 195 Watts (355%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (1000%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 340%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65280 (340%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 487%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23360 (487%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.