Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 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 2GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 should be 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be quite a bit (about 49%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.