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

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which has core speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator 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 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is much (about 270%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134800 (270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be a lot (about 236%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47200 (236%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.