Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 55104 (77%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is much (about 72%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21000 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is superior to the Radeon R9 M270X, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (72%)

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 transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.