Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M380 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 31104 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB will be a lot (more or less 25%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (25%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB will be quite a bit (about 25%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M380, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (25%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.