Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be much (more or less 146%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32640 (146%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21920 (391%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.