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Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 975 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which features GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB 190 Watts
Radeon HD 5970 294 Watts
Difference: 104 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB 124800 MB/sec
Difference: 131200 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 480%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB 40000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 192000 (480%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB 16000 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 76800 (480%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5970

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.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 4890 2GB Radeon HD 5970
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year Apr 2, 2009 November 2009
Code Name RV790 XT Hemlock XT
Memory 2048 MB 1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed 1000 MHz 725 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 3900 MHz 4000 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 190 watts 294 watts
Bandwidth 124800 MB/sec 256000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 40000 Mtexels/sec 232000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 16000 Mpixels/sec 92800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 800(160x5) 1600 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 40 160 (x2)
Render Output Units 16 64 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit (x2)
Fab Process 55 nm 40 nm
Transistors 959 million 2154 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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's 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 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This number is calculated 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 processed per second.

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

Display Prices

Hide Prices

Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5970

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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