Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

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

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, and very much so. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a 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 number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.