Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 256896 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G should be a lot (approximately 220%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 110000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390 8G is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (220%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.