Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M395X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M395X should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X is much (more or less 149%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55344 (149%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be just a bit (about 7%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M395X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1664 (7%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.