Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 4491 (139%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 is 50% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be a lot (more or less 27%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be capable of handling the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.