Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator 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 R9 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 6636 (205%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (more or less 82%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that 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 amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.