In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro S9150 are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850 PowerColor Edition.

The FirePro S9150 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed and 128 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. This results in the FirePro S9150 providing 121.2 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 FirePro S9150 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 6850. This results in the FirePro S9150 providing 32.8 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro S9150 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the FirePro S9150 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 S9150 has 15360 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 S9150 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro S9150 has 192 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro S9150 is massively better than the HD 6850.

The FirePro S9150 has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 PowerColor Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro S9150 is 2534 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The FirePro S9150 having 2162 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro S9150 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The FirePro S9150 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the FirePro S9150 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The FirePro S9150 requires 235 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6850 PowerColor Edition requires 127 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the FirePro S9150. The FirePro S9150 requires 108 Watts more than the HD 6850 to run. The difference is significant enough that the FirePro S9150 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6850.