Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1150 MHz on this card. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should be 73% faster than the Radeon R7 250 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 53504 (73%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should be a lot (more or less 108%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is superior to the Radeon R7 250, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (150%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.