Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1650 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 470 4GB will be 66% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 84096 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB will be quite a bit (about 137%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68528 (137%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a lot (approximately 48%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9632 (48%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.