Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which features clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 52 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 14% faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB is quite a bit (more or less 64%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (64%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be much (about 42%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (42%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.