Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also 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 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 90048 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (about 172%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43000 (172%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (approximately 172%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (172%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.