Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with 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 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (approximately 367%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 82096 (367%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24256 (433%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.