In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition.

The RX Vega has a 288 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. This results in the RX Vega providing 64.8 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 RX Vega has a 288 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 6850. This results in the RX Vega providing 43.2 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 RX Vega was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the RX Vega 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 RX Vega has 3072 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 RX Vega also has superior memory performance overall.

The RX Vega has 281.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the RX Vega is massively better than the HD 6850.

The Radeon RX Vega 11 has 1536 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the RX Vega is 1188 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The RX Vega having 816 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX Vega delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The RX Vega transistor size technology is 26 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the RX Vega is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the RX Vega should consume less power than the HD 6850.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the RX Vega 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 RX Vega. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RX Vega.