Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M270X, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M270X will be a little bit (about 16%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface 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 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 max fill rate.