In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R7 250E.

The Radeon R7 250E has a 25 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon R7 250E. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 11.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon R7 250E. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon R7 250E has a 25 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the Radeon R7 250E. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 12 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon R7 250E. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon R7 250E was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the Radeon R7 250E 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 Radeon R7 250E and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 6850 has 56 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon R7 250E, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is much better than the Radeon R7 250E.

The Radeon R7 250E has 512 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R7 250E is 348 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The HD 6850 having 24 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 6850 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon R7 250E.

The Radeon R7 250E transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the Radeon R7 250E is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The Radeon R7 250E requires 55 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the Radeon R7 250E and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 6850 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the Radeon R7 250E. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon R7 250E.