Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features a clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip 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 ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.