Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 195200 (156%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be quite a bit (about 252%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 100800 (252%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is much (about 220%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (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 over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.