In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro D300 are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition.

The FirePro D300 and the HD 6850 have the same core clock speed of 775 MHz, but the FirePro D300 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. As a result, the FirePro D300 exhibits a 24.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6850. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The FirePro D300 and the HD 6850 have both the same core clock speed and the same Pixel Fill Rate. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro D300 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the FirePro D300 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 6850 when running the latest games.

The FirePro D300 has 1024 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 FirePro D300 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro D300 has 32 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro D300 is noticeably better than the HD 6850.

The FirePro D300 has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro D300 is 645 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The FirePro D300 having 273 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro D300 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The FirePro D300 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the FirePro D300 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The FirePro D300 requires 150 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the FirePro D300 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The two GPUs have been recommended a PSU with the same amount of wattage. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.