Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be 36% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be a small bit (approximately 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5120 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a bit (about 10%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (10%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (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 the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 max fill rate.