Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units 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 390X 8G		13555 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 11160 (466%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 390X 8G is 200% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be a lot (about 397%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 147600 (397%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42400 (171%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 per second.

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