Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 250, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4790 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon R7 250 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 is a lot (more or less 25%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4790 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (20%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of 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 output rate is also dependant on many 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.