Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which has a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1150 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 10048 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB should be just a bit (about 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 1GB is superior to the Radeon R7 250, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (25%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.