Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (211%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is quite a bit (approximately 291%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53600 (291%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19600 (213%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.