Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (74%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a bit (more or less 14%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (45%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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