Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7790 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 32448 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be much (more or less 124%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31000 (124%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (more or less 60%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6000 (60%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.