GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The GeForce GTX 1060 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be quite a bit (about 71%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.