Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which features a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (approximately 82%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (82%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (more or less 100%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (100%)

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 past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.