Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (about 468%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 86096 (468%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (more or less 225%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20656 (225%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.