Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 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 HD 6850		2395 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 245 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be just a bit (approximately 11%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (11%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 85%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11360 (85%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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