AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2 vs Intel HD Graphics P4600 Comparison

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2 and the Intel HD Graphics P4600 occupy very different corners of the GPU landscape, yet the recorded benchmark data places them closer together than their hardware specs would suggest. Both are end-of-life parts, both sit in the lower tiers of the historical performance distribution, and both were measured in the database with a single Geekbench OpenCL run. What the data shows is a 17.4 percent advantage for the AMD card in that one shared test, alongside a set of specification differences that could hardly be more dramatic. That tension, a modest measured gap sitting on top of an enormous hardware gap, is what makes this pairing worth investigating.

Where Each One Wins

There is only one head-to-head benchmark in the database for this comparison, and the AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2 wins it. The Geekbench OpenCL scores are 3977 for the AMD card versus 3389 for the Intel integrated graphics, a 17.4 percent margin in AMD's favor. That gives the HD 6850 X2 one win and the P4600 zero wins in direct comparison.

Does that single result settle the question? Partially. A 17.4 percent gap in compute throughput is real and consistent with the raw specification advantages the AMD card holds, which are examined below. But it is worth asking what a compute test captures and what it misses. The P4600 belongs to a system-shared memory design with no dedicated video memory of its own, so its OpenCL result is inherently dependent on the host platform's memory configuration. The database records this as "System Dependent" bandwidth, which means the P4600's measured score is less a fixed property of the chip and more a property of the machine it lived in.

Where the P4600 wins is not in any benchmark, but in integration and platform footprint. It is an IGP, drawing 84 W of total package power with no slot occupancy, no power connectors, and no suggested PSU requirement. The HD 6850 X2 is a dual-slot discrete card with two 8-pin power connectors, a 254 W TDP, and a suggested 600 W power supply. If the question is "which one wins in Geekbench OpenCL," the answer is AMD. If the question is "which one can exist inside a system without dedicated power delivery," the answer is Intel, and that is not a trivial consideration.

There is also an API dimension worth flagging. The P4600 supports DirectX 12 at the 11_1 feature level, OpenGL 4.3, and Vulkan 1.0. The HD 6850 X2 supports DirectX 11.2 at the 11_0 level and OpenGL 4.4, with no Vulkan support listed. On paper, the newer integrated part supports a later DirectX feature level and a modern low-overhead API that the AMD card lacks entirely. The benchmark data cannot tell us how much that matters in practice, but the database records it clearly.

The Verdict

Strictly from the recorded data, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2 is the faster compute part. Its Geekbench OpenCL score of 3977 beats the P4600's 3389 by 17.4 percent, and its percentile placement against all GPUs in the database, the 24th percentile versus the P4600's 20th, confirms a small but real tier separation.

Who should pick which? Anyone choosing based on measured GPU compute performance should pick the HD 6850 X2. Its raw rendering resources are overwhelming relative to the integrated part: 960 shading units against 160, 48 texture units against 20, 32 render output units against 2, and 1.536 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput against 384.0 GFLOPS. The pixel rate gap is the starkest of all, 25.60 GPixel/s versus 2.400 GPixel/s, more than a factor of ten in the discrete card's favor.

Who should pick the P4600? Someone constrained to integrated graphics, or someone who values the API support: DirectX 12 at the 11_1 level and Vulkan 1.0. It is also the far lower-power option by any qualitative reading, drawing 84 W for the package versus a 254 W TDP and a 600 W suggested PSU on the AMD side. Note, however, that the OpenCL gap of 17.4 percent is far smaller than any of those hardware ratios. The investigation this data invites is why. A possible reading: the HD 6850 X2 is a dual-GPU design on older 40 nm TeraScale 2 architecture, and single compute workloads may not fully exploit it, while the P4600's Haswell-era design at 22 nm extracts more from far fewer resources than the spec sheet implies. The database cannot prove that mechanism, but the numbers are consistent with it.

Against their respective nearest rivals, both cards sit in tight clusters. The HD 6850 X2 is within a fraction of a percent of the NVIDIA Quadro K2000 (3964 average score, 0.3 percent), the GeForce 830M (3957, 0.5 percent), the Radeon R5 M420 (3956, 0.5 percent), and the GT 745M (3953, 0.6 percent). The P4600 trails the GeForce GT 740 by 1.2 percent and the Quadro 2000M by 1.3 percent, while leading the HD Graphics 530 by 1.7 percent and the GT 730M by 2.2 percent. In short: both are mainstream-tier parts of their eras, and neither dominates its own neighborhood.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The single recorded head-to-head test is Geekbench OpenCL. The AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2 scored 3977; the Intel HD Graphics P4600 scored 3389. The winner is the AMD card, by 17.4 percent.

That is the entire quantitative confrontation, so it deserves careful interpretation. Seventeen percent is a meaningful but not decisive margin. It is larger than any gap between either card and its nearest rivals, all of which fall within roughly two percent. It is, however, dramatically smaller than the theoretical hardware ratios. The FP32 compute figures differ by a factor of four (1.536 TFLOPS versus 384.0 GFLOPS), the pixel rates by more than ten times, and the ROP counts by a factor of sixteen. A reader might expect a blowout; the data instead shows a competitive contest in compute, which raises fair questions about how much of the AMD card's paper advantage translates into measured throughput in this particular workload.

FAQ

Q: Which GPU is faster in the recorded benchmarks?

A: The AMD Radeon HD 6850 X2. It scored 3977 in Geekbench OpenCL against 3389 for the Intel HD Graphics P4600, a 17.4 percent advantage.

Q: How do the two compare against all GPUs in the database?

A: The HD 6850 X2 sits at the 24th percentile; the P4600 sits at the 20th percentile. Both are lower-tier parts relative to the full GPU population.

Q: Which card has the API advantage?

A: The P4600. It supports DirectX 12 (11_1 feature level), OpenGL 4.3, and Vulkan 1.0. The HD 6850 X2 supports DirectX 11.2 (11_0) and OpenGL 4.4, with no Vulkan listed. The AMD card's OpenGL version is slightly higher; the Intel card's DirectX support is newer.

Q: How much power does each require?

A: The HD 6850 X2 has a 254 W TDP, needs two 8-pin power connectors, occupies a dual slot, and carries a suggested 600 W power supply. The P4600 is an integrated GPU with an 84 W package TDP and no power connectors or PSU recommendation.

Q: What memory does each GPU use?

A: The HD 6850 X2 has 2 GB of dedicated GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus, running at 1050 MHz (4.2 Gbps effective) for 134.4 GB/s of bandwidth. The P4600 uses system-shared memory with system-dependent bandwidth.

Q: Are either of these cards still in production?

A: No. Both are listed as end-of-life. The HD 6850 X2 was released in September 2011; the P4600 in May 2013.

Architecture Differences

These two parts come from entirely different design philosophies. The HD 6850 X2 is built on AMD's Barts chip, TeraScale 2 architecture, part of the Northern Islands generation (HD 6800). It was fabricated by TSMC on a 40 nm process, packs 1,700 million transistors onto a 255 mm² die, and succeeded the Evergreen architecture before being replaced by Southern Islands.

The P4600 is Intel's Haswell GT2, classified as Generation 7.5 graphics within the HD Graphics-W family. It was fabricated by Intel on a 22 nm process, a full node-and-a-half advantage in lithography terms, though the database records no transistor count or die size for it. Neither part lists RT cores or tensor cores; hardware ray tracing and AI acceleration simply were not features of either era.

The most consequential architectural split is the memory subsystem. Dedicated GDDR5 with 134.4 GB/s of guaranteed bandwidth versus system-shared memory with no fixed bandwidth at all. For bandwidth-sensitive workloads, this is arguably a bigger differentiator than the shading unit count, and it is a structural advantage the benchmark's single score may underrepresent.

Specification Differences

The fields where these two differ, per the recorded data:

• Manufacturer: AMD versus Intel
• Chip and architecture: Barts / TeraScale 2 versus Haswell GT2 / Generation 7.5
• Process node: 40 nm (TSMC) versus 22 nm (Intel)
• Transistors and die size: 1,700 million on 255 mm² (6.7M per mm²) versus not recorded
• Clocks: the AMD card lists only memory clocks (1050 MHz, 4.2 Gbps effective); the P4600 lists a 350 MHz base and 1200 MHz boost with system-shared memory
• Memory: 2 GB GDDR5, 256-bit, 134.4 GB/s versus system-shared everything
• Shading units: 960 versus 160
• Texture units: 48 versus 20
• ROPs: 32 versus 2
• Pixel rate: 25.60 GPixel/s versus 2.400 GPixel/s
• Texture rate: 38.40 GTexel/s versus 24.00 GTexel/s
• FP32: 1.536 TFLOPS versus 384.0 GFLOPS
• TDP: 254 W versus 84 W
• Form factor: dual-slot with two 8-pin connectors versus IGP with none
• Bus: PCIe 2.0 x16 versus Ring Bus
• APIs: DirectX 11.2 / OpenGL 4.4 versus DirectX 12 (11_1) / OpenGL 4.3 / Vulkan 1.0
• Release: September 2011 versus May 2013

Every measured number favors the AMD card; the newest API support and the smallest power footprint favor the Intel one. The data leaves the rest to the workload.