Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 380X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units 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 R9 380X		9519 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 7124 (297%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 380X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be quite a bit (about 234%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 86960 (234%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6240 (25%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.