Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be 50% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is quite a bit (about 27%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel fill rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at AA, and be capable of handling the same 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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.