In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4850 Golden Sample Edition.

The R7 260X has a 330 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 4850. This results in the R7 260X providing 29.7 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 260X has a 330 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 4850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R7 260X providing 5.3 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released over three years more recently than the HD 4850, and so the R7 260X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 4850 when running the latest games.

The R7 260X has 512 MB more video memory than the HD 4850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R7 260X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R7 260X has 25.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 4850, which means that the memory performance of the R7 260X is slightly better than the HD 4850.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4850 Golden Sample Edition has 800. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the HD 4850 is 392. The R7 260X having 392 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 260X delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 4850.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 4850. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 4850.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4850 Golden Sample Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X.