Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 281600 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is a lot (more or less 733%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 140800 (733%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution 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 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54400 (567%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved 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 RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.