Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 470 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 will be a lot (about 68%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		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 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.