Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M270X, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 is 78% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is a lot (about 28%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8200 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (114%)

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 over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 reach the max fill rate.