Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 is 278% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 176448 (278%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (approximately 318%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79496 (318%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19856 (199%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.