Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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 7870		6230 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 3835 (160%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 48 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 should be 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (more or less 115%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42800 (115%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (approximately 29%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (29%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.