Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 320448 (504%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be much (about 639%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 159800 (639%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 57200 (572%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.