Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

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 6950		3240 points
Radeon HD 7770		3180 points
	Difference: 60 (2%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 is 122% quicker than the Radeon HD 7770 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (approximately 76%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30400 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (more or less 60%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7770, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (60%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.