Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which has core clock speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 TAUs and 64 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 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 326400 (567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (approximately 725%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 162400 (725%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be much (more or less 1100%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4730, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 61600 (1100%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.