Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 115648 (182%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a lot (about 188%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47000 (188%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.