Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which has clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 480 4GB should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 101376 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB is much (approximately 334%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 124080 (334%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 4GB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.