Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 HD 4850 X2 1GB should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M380 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 31104 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is much (approximately 25%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (25%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out 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 DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.