GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 1060, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 36608 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be quite a bit (more or less 71%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50080 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46688 (182%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.