Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 115648 (182%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be much (about 188%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47000 (188%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18800 (188%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.