Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which features clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 480 4GB is 80% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 102272 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB should be a lot (more or less 223%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111280 (223%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB is a lot (more or less 79%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15840 (79%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 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.