In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 7860K are noticeably better than the Intel HD i7 6700K.

The Radeon R7 7860K has a 407 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD i7 6700K. This results in the Radeon R7 7860K providing 18.6 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 Radeon R7 7860K has a 407 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD i7 6700K and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon R7 7860K providing 3.3 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 Radeon R7 7860K was released less than a year after the HD i7 6700K, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon R7 7860K and the HD i7 6700K have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The memory bandwidth of the Radeon R7 7860K and the HD i7 6700K are the same, which means the Radeon R7 7860K and the HD i7 6700K have equal limitations when it comes to graphical data transfer.

The Radeon R7 7860K has 512 Shader Processing Units and the HD i7 6700K has 24. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R7 7860K is 252 and the actual shader performance of the HD i7 6700K is 221. The Radeon R7 7860K having 31 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon R7 7860K delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD i7 6700K.

The HD i7 6700K transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon R7 7860K. This means that the HD i7 6700K is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon R7 7860K.

The Radeon R7 7860K requires 65 Watts to run and the HD i7 6700K requires 91 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon R7 7860K and a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the HD i7 6700K. The HD i7 6700K requires 26 Watts more than the Radeon R7 7860K to run. The difference is not significant enough for the HD i7 6700K to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon R7 7860K.