Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 5566 (232%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (about 181%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67296 (181%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5056 (20%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

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