Radeon HD 4850 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M380, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 32448 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be much (approximately 60%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6000 (60%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.