Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which features core speeds of 918 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 285 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (about 157%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62816 (157%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be quite a bit (more or less 84%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13376 (84%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.