Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270X is 41% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 52096 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X should be a lot (about 60%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be a lot (approximately 60%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (60%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.