Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7770, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 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 HD 7770		3180 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 785 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 47 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be a little bit (approximately 8%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (55%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.