Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which comes with clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 470 4GB should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (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 is quite a bit (approximately 68%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, but only just. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.