Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be a lot (about 31%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22144 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a small bit (more or less 11%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M390X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2464 (11%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.