GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 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

GeForce GTX 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 9119 (281%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 1060 will be 23% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 will be much (about 71%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 will be quite a bit (more or less 182%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (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 its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.