HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo vs MSI Radeon HD 6850 (R6850-PM2D1GD5)

Because both graphics cards have the same number of ROPs and the Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo is clocked higher, its pixel fillrate is higher. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, and is an indication of better card performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

Although pixel fillrate is one of a few key characteristics of GPUs, it is less important than texture fill rate. This parameter is proportional to graphics clock rate and the number of TMUs. Since two cards have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo graphics card operates at higher frequency, its texture fillrate is higher. Having better texture fill rate allows the GPU to map more textures and/or utilize more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, indicates how good the graphics card is at running applications, that use single-precision floating point numbers. Generally, the more CUDA cores or stream processors the graphics card has, and the the faster they operate at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo graphics card has an upper hand here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card 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 tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the GPU 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. The bandwidth depends on a few components, such as memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo comes with higher memory clock. As a result, it has higher memory bandwidth.