Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6850

Radeon HD 5870
Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 23 Sep 2009
Radeon HD 5870
Radeon HD 6850
Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 21 Oct 2010
Radeon HD 6850

Summary

Synthetic performance index

  • Radeon HD 5870
    112%
  • Radeon HD 6850
    100%

Relative performance

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 5870

Around 12% higher average synthetic performance.
Based on an outdated architecture (ATI TeraScale), there are no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 6850

61 watts lower power draw. This might be a strong point if your current power supply is not enough to handle the Radeon HD 5870 .
This is a much newer product, it might have better long term support.
Based on an outdated architecture (ATI TeraScale), there are no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Radeon HD 5870

HWBench recommends Radeon HD 5870

The Radeon HD 5870 is the better performing card based on the synthetic benchmarks used (1 benchmarks).


Specifications

Core Configuration

Radeon HD 5870Radeon HD 6850
GPU NameCypress (Cypress XT)vsBarts (Barts PRO)
Fab Process40 nmvs40 nm
Die Size334 mm²vs255 mm²
Transistors2,154 millionvs1,700 million
Shaders1600vs960
Compute Units20vs12
Core clock850 MHzvs775 MHz
ROPs32vs32
TMUs80vs48

Memory Configuration

Radeon HD 5870Radeon HD 6850
Memory TypeGDDR5vsGDDR5
Bus Width256 bitvs256 bit
Memory Speed1200 MHz
4800 MHz effective
vs1000 MHz
4000 MHz effective
Memory Size1024 Mbvs1024 Mb

Additional details

Radeon HD 5870Radeon HD 6850
TDP188 wattsvs127 watts
Release Date23 Sep 2009vs21 Oct 2010

Raw Performance comparison

Pixel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5870
    27.20 GP/s
  • Radeon HD 6850
    24.80 GP/s

GigaPixels - higher is better

Texel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5870
    68.00 GT/s
  • Radeon HD 6850
    37.20 GT/s

GigaTexels - higher is better

Memory bandwidth

  • Radeon HD 5870
    154.00 GB/s
  • Radeon HD 6850
    128.00 GB/s

GB/s - higher is better

Single precision performance

  • Radeon HD 5870
    2720.00 GFLOPs
  • Radeon HD 6850
    1488.00 GFLOPs

GFLOPs - higher is better

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark 11

  • Radeon HD 5870
    4290
  • Radeon HD 6850
    3810

Points (higher is better)