Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which has clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 4721 (146%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 is 50% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (approximately 48%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34096 (48%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be just a bit (approximately 17%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4256 (17%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.