In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia Quadro 6000.

The HD 6850 has a 201 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro 6000. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 6850 manages to provide 5.1 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 6850 has a 201 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro 6000, but the Quadro 6000 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 6850. As a result, the Quadro 6000 exhibits a 2.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 6850. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Quadro 6000 was released less than a year after the HD 6850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Quadro 6000 has 5120 MB more video memory than the HD 6850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Quadro 6000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro 6000 has 15.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro 6000 is slightly better than the HD 6850.

The Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro 6000 has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro 6000 is 514. The Quadro 6000 having 142 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Quadro 6000 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The Quadro 6000 requires 204 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 6850. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the Quadro 6000. The Quadro 6000 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 6850. The difference is significant enough that the Quadro 6000 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6850.