Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (more or less 270%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (approximately 196%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (196%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.