Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M270X is 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M270X will be just a bit (approximately 16%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (16%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.