Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6850

If you are going to buy a new graphics card and are choosing between Radeon HD 6790 and Radeon HD 6850, there are a couple of things to consider. Cards with more VRAM in general perform better and allow you to play on higher graphics settings. Size also makes a difference. A model with a large heatsink can occupy up to three expansion slots on a motherboard. Be sure you have enough room in your PC case. When comparing GPUs with different architectures, more processing cores and even higher TFLOPS will not always translate to better performance. To help you decide which GPU you need, we have measured frame rates in a number of popular games. For more on how the Radeon HD 6790 stacks up against Radeon HD 6850, check out specs charts below.

Main Specs

  Radeon HD 6790 Radeon HD 6850
Power consumption (TDP) 150 Watt 127 Watt
Interface PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe 2.0 x16
Supplementary power connectors 2x 6-pin 1x 6-pin
Memory type GDDR5 GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount 1 GB 1 GB
Display Connectors 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort
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  • Radeon HD 6790 has 18% more power consumption, than Radeon HD 6850.
  • Both video cards are using PCIe 2.0 x16 interface connection to a motherboard.
  • Radeon HD 6790 and Radeon HD 6850 have maximum RAM of 1 GB.
  • Both cards are used in Desktops.
  • Radeon HD 6790 is build with Terascale 2 architecture, and Radeon HD 6850 - with TeraScale 2.
  • Radeon HD 6790 and Radeon HD 6850 are manufactured by 40 nm process technology.
  • Both graphics cards are the same length of 198 mm.

Game benchmarks

high / 1080p 7−8 9−10
ultra / 1080p 4−5 5−6
QHD / 1440p 0−1 0−1
low / 720p 18−20 21−24
medium / 1080p 9−10 12−14
The average gaming FPS of Radeon HD 6850 in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is 20% more, than Radeon HD 6790.

Full Specs

  Radeon HD 6790 Radeon HD 6850
Architecture Terascale 2 TeraScale 2
Code name Barts Barts
Type Desktop Desktop
Release date 4 April 2011 21 October 2010
Pipelines 800 960
Core clock speed 840 MHz
Transistor count 1,700 million 1,700 million
Manufacturing process technology 40 nm 40 nm
Texture fill rate 33.60 37.20
Floating-point performance 1,344.0 gflops 1,488.0 gflops
Length 198 mm 198 mm
Memory bus width 256 Bit 256 Bit
Memory clock speed 1050 MHz
Memory bandwidth 134.4 GB/s 128.0 GB/s
DirectX 11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model 5.0 5.0
OpenGL 4.4 4.4
OpenCL 1.2 1.2
Vulkan N/A
Bus support AGP
Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256) 122 Mh/s 139 Mh/s
Eyefinity +
Design reference
CrossFire +
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