Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 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 390 8G		12733 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 10338 (432%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 148 Watts (117%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 390 8G will be 200% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G should be quite a bit (approximately 330%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122800 (330%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G should be much (about 158%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (158%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.