Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 250X, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 250X, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X is a lot (more or less 60%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6000 (60%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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