Radeon HD 4830 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 167% faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (more or less 270%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (270%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (196%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.