Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 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 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 5260 (162%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 285 is 10% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (approximately 46%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32416 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be a little bit (about 15%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6950, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (15%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.