Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 21% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 26496 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (about 36%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (36%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.