Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (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 much (approximately 27%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at FSAA, and be able to handle 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 largest 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 interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.