Radeon HD 4830 1GB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230400 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (more or less 491%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 90400 (491%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be much (approximately 196%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (196%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.