Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is quite a bit (about 38%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (about 38%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (38%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.