In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro W9100 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition.

The HD 7850 has a 45 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro W9100, but the FirePro W9100 has 112 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7850. As a result, the FirePro W9100 exhibits a 101.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7850. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7850 has a 45 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro W9100, but the FirePro W9100 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7850. As a result, the FirePro W9100 exhibits a 28.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7850. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro W9100 was released over a year more recently than the HD 7850, and so the FirePro W9100 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 7850.

The FirePro W9100 has 15360 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the FirePro W9100 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro W9100 has 166.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7850, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro W9100 is massively better than the HD 7850.

The FirePro W9100 has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro W9100 is 2619 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849. The FirePro W9100 having 1770 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro W9100 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7850.

The FirePro W9100 requires 290 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the FirePro W9100 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850. The FirePro W9100 has been recommended a PSU with 250 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the FirePro W9100 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.