Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically perform a bit faster than 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 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by a large margin. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.