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 350.

The Radeon R7 350 has a 225 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon R7 350. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 13.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon R7 350. 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 350 has a 225 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 24 more Render Output Units than the Radeon R7 350. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 16.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon R7 350. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon R7 350 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the Radeon R7 350 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 350 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 6850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 6850 has 54.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon R7 350, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is much better than the Radeon R7 350.

The Radeon R7 350 has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R7 350 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 Radeon R7 350.

The Radeon R7 350 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the Radeon R7 350 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The Radeon R7 350 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 Radeon R7 350 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 350. 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 350.