Radeon HD 4850 512MB vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M275X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 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 R9 M275X		50 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (120%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M275X should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M275X should be quite a bit (about 44%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M275X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (44%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is 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 it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.