Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 270X, which features core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon R9 270X should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (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 (approximately 220%) more effective at 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is the winner, and very much so. (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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of 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 higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.