Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280X should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 160896 (127%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is much (approximately 118%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58800 (118%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (about 36%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (36%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.