Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which has clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 470 4GB is 65% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (65%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is quite a bit (about 219%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81328 (219%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4832 (19%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.