Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 5336 (223%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 73 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is quite a bit (more or less 141%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52400 (141%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a little bit (approximately 3%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 6850, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.