Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 260X, which has a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R7 260X		4381 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 1986 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6850 should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is quite a bit (about 66%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (41%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.