ATI Radeon HD 6850 vs MSI Radeon HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC (R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 Power Edition/OC)

The maximum theoretical pixel fillrate is dependent on the number of ROPs and graphics frequency. The MSI Radeon HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC has an upper hand in this area, as it operates at higher rate, and both GPUs have identical number of Raster Operations Pipelines. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased card performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

Another important parameter, that influences overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is defined as the number of TMUs, multiplied by graphics clock speed. The MSI Radeon HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC has a small lead here, as it runs at higher frequency, and both graphics cards have the same number of Texture Mapping Units. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can use more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each textured picture element, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, illustrates how fast the graphics card is at running applications, that make an extensive use of single-precision floating point numbers. Generally, the faster CUDA cores or stream processors operate at, and the more cores / processors the GPU has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The MSI Radeon HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics unit will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Memory bandwidth parameter specifies how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. GPUs with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the MSI Radeon HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC graphics card offers higher clocked memory. Consequently, it has higher memory bandwidth.