Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 112896 (89%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (about 109%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54496 (109%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (about 49%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9856 (49%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.