Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 250X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 250X should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X will be a lot (approximately 60%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X is much (about 60%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.