Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 256896 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (more or less 270%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134800 (270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is a lot (approximately 236%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47200 (236%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 the card's 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 lots of 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.