Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 192896 (152%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (approximately 156%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78000 (156%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (156%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.