Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which features core speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 470 4GB should be 32% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB should be quite a bit (about 68%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48128 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4032 (16%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.