Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs 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 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4861 (169%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be much (more or less 78%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be a bit (more or less 13%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel 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 reach the maximum fill rate.