Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 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 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

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (about 181%) better at AF 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 lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, though not by far. (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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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