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Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The Radeon HD 4790 makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which features GPU core speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 960 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850 128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790 102400 MB/sec
Difference: 25600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (about 94%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850 37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790 19200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 18000 (94%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 158%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850 24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790 9600 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 15200 (158%)

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

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Radeon HD 4790

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 6850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 4790 Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year 2009 October 2010
Code Name RV790 Barts Pro
Memory 512 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 600 MHz 775 MHz
Memory Speed 3200 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) (Unknown) watts 127 watts
Bandwidth 102400 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 19200 Mtexels/sec 37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 9600 Mpixels/sec 24800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 640(128x5) 960
Texture Mapping Units 32 48
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 55 nm 40 nm
Transistors 959 million 1700 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 4790

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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