Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260X should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB should be much (about 26%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 1GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3400 (52%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.