Radeon HD 4650 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		55 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (860%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (more or less 254%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (254%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is superior to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (467%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.