Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 280X		8886 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 6491 (271%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 123 Watts (97%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (approximately 192%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71600 (192%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (10%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.