Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which has GPU core speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230400 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (approximately 386%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 86400 (386%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (386%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.