Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 470, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 926 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 470 should be 232% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 147648 (232%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 should be a lot (more or less 374%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93528 (374%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19632 (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 are applied per second. This is worked out 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.