Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 224448 (353%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (approximately 335%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83800 (335%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (172%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.