Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with GPU clock speed of 918 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 6105 (255%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 285 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be quite a bit (approximately 176%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65616 (176%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a little bit (more or less 18%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4576 (18%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 can 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.