Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 715 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 111104 (694%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB will be a lot (approximately 191%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32840 (191%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14280 (250%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.