Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 R7 260X		4381 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 1986 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be much faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (approximately 66%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (about 41%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (41%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.