Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 33% quicker than the Radeon HD 7790 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (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 (about 51%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, and very much so. (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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 applied in a second.

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