Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (131%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (more or less 172%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68800 (172%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (70%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.