Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 224448 (353%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is a lot (about 335%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83800 (335%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (172%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.