Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 250X, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 250X should be 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (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 (approximately 60%) better at AF 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 running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.