Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 should be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (about 133%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (33%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.