Radeon HD 4730 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which features core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 69504 (121%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB will be quite a bit (more or less 123%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (123%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be much (approximately 257%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4730, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (257%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.