Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all of 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 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (64%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270X should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 115648 (182%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be much (more or less 220%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22000 (220%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a 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. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.