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 250 HIS iCooler 1GB Edition.

The R7 250 has a 225 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 250. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 13.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 250. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 250 has a 225 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 24 more Render Output Units than the R7 250. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 16.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 250. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 250 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the R7 250 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 250 HIS iCooler 1GB Edition 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 54.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 250, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is much better than the R7 250.

The Radeon R7 250 HIS iCooler 1GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 250 is 343 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The HD 6850 having 29 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 R7 250.

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

The Radeon R7 250 HIS iCooler 1GB Edition requires 65 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 R7 250 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 R7 250. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 250.