Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (189%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 326400 (567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is quite a bit (about 770%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 141600 (770%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390 8G is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54800 (596%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.