Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 112896 (89%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a lot (about 79%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39600 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (28%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 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 reach the max fill rate.