Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 480, which comes with GPU core speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 10954 (457%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134144 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is quite a bit (about 334%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 124080 (334%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11040 (45%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.