Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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 HD 7850		5200 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 2805 (117%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (about 48%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17840 (48%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2720 (11%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.