Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which has core clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be quite a bit (more or less 256%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50600 (256%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a lot (more or less 288%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R7 M260X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19000 (288%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.