Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be a lot (more or less 49%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be a little bit (about 7%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.