Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 470 4GB should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (65%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a lot (approximately 219%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81328 (219%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a bit (about 19%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6850, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4832 (19%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.