Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 52 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X is quite a bit (more or less 35%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 72%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10400 (72%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.