Radeon HD 6850 vs FirePro D500

Place in the ranking	426	622
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	no data	0.96
Power efficiency	2.74	2.77
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)	TeraScale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code name	Tahiti	Barts
Market segment	Workstation	Desktop
Design	no data	reference
Release date	18 January 2014 (10 years ago)	21 October 2010 (14 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	no data	$179

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1536	960
Core clock speed	725 MHz	no data
Number of transistors	4,313 million	1,700 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	127 Watt
Texture fill rate	69.60	37.20
Floating-point processing power	2.227 TFLOPS	1.488 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	32
TMUs	96	48

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Bus support	no data	AGP
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Length	279 mm	198 mm
Width	2-slot	2-slot
Supplementary power connectors	no data	1x 6-pin

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	1 GB
Memory bus width	384 Bit	256 Bit
Memory clock speed	1270 MHz	no data
Memory bandwidth	243.8 GB/s	128.0 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors	6x mini-DisplayPort, 1x SDI	2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort
Eyefinity	-	+
HDMI	-	+

Supported technologies

Supported technological solutions. This information will prove useful if you need some particular technology for your purposes.

CrossFire

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	12 (11_1)	DirectX® 11
Shader Model	5.1	5.0
OpenGL	4.6	4.4
OpenCL	1.2	1.2
Vulkan	1.2.131	-

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	10.84	5.09
Recency	18 January 2014	21 October 2010
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	1 GB
Chip lithography	28 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	127 Watt

FirePro D500 has a 113% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 3 years, a 200% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 42.9% more advanced lithography process.

HD 6850, on the other hand, has 115.7% lower power consumption.

The FirePro D500 is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon HD 6850 in performance tests.

Be aware that FirePro D500 is a workstation graphics card while Radeon HD 6850 is a desktop one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.