Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator 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 7790		4330 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 1935 (81%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 42 Watts (49%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 7790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (more or less 51%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18800 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is much (about 55%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7790, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.