Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with GPU core speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 135040 (106%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (approximately 323%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 161536 (323%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is quite a bit (approximately 135%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27008 (135%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.