Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270X, which features clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270X should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (44%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be quite a bit (approximately 100%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.