Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 256%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 114560 (256%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40320 (315%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many 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.