Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be 23% quicker than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (approximately 70%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28000 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (more or less 70%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (70%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.