Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M270X should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M270X will be a small bit (about 16%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (16%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.