Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (192%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4890 2GB should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R7 250 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (70%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB is quite a bit (approximately 67%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB should be a lot (more or less 100%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 250, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (100%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.