Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 960 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 6850		2395 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 245 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 is 5% quicker than the Radeon HD 6850 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is just a bit (approximately 11%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (11%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 85%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6790, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11360 (85%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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