Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, 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 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 3050 (142%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 6790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot (more or less 64%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21440 (64%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (105%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the video card 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 Raster Operations Pipelines 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.