Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 4985 (154%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (65%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (about 68%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.