Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7770, which has a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation 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 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7770 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 76%) more effective at texture filtering 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 is much (more or less 60%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7770, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.