Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (120%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 550, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 51136 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 is a lot (approximately 41%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10200 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 should be quite a bit (more or less 76%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7600 (76%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.