AMD Radeon HD 7850 vs ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II (R7265-DC2-2GD5)

Since both graphics units have the same number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs), and the Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II GPU has higher operating frequency, it also has higher pixel fillrate. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, and is an indication of better graphics card performance, unless the GPU is limited by something else, such as memory bandwidth or texture mapping.

Another important parameter, that influences overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is defined as the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), multiplied by graphics clock speed. The Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II has an edge here, because it runs at insignificantly higher frequency, and both cards have identical number of TMUs. Having better texture fill rate allows the GPU to map more textures and/or use more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance shows how fast the graphics card is at executing applications, that utilize single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is expressed in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. All single-precision calculations are performed by CUDA cores or stream processors, therefore the more cores / processors the graphics card has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock speed. The ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. Since games do not use double-precision arithmetics, this characteristic is irrelevant to games performance. The ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II has a small lead here.

Memory bandwidth parameter tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Graphics cards with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II graphics card offers higher clocked memory. Consequently, it has higher memory bandwidth.