Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units 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 R9 270X		6590 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 4195 (175%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be much (approximately 115%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42800 (115%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (29%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 applied in one second. This figure 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.