Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which has core speeds of 918 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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 R9 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 6105 (255%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 285 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be quite a bit (more or less 176%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65616 (176%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be a bit (more or less 18%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6850, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4576 (18%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.