Radeon HD 4890 2GB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (65%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4890 2GB should be a little bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 20800 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (more or less 54%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 260X is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (10%)

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 max amount of information (counted in 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, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.