Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7850 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 90048 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (about 120%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30040 (120%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (more or less 175%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17520 (175%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure 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 graphics card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 is also dependant 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 get to the max fill rate.