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Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon HD 5870

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 speed of 975 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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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, the Radeon HD 5870 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (approximately 70%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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 should be quite a bit (about 70%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and also will be 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

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Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5870

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 5870
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year Apr 2, 2009 September 23, 2009
Code Name RV790 XT Cypress XT
Memory 2048 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 1000 MHz 850 MHz
Memory Speed 3900 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 190 watts 188 watts
Bandwidth 124800 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 40000 Mtexels/sec 68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 16000 Mpixels/sec 27200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 800(160x5) 1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units 40 80
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 55 nm 40 nm
Transistors 959 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5870

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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