Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1400 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270X should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 52096 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X should be quite a bit (about 60%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.