Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 176448 (278%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be quite a bit (about 258%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64600 (258%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15600 (156%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.