Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 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 270		5943 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 2703 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a bit (more or less 2%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be just a bit (about 13%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6950, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.