Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The Radeon HD 6870 comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 6870	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	October 2010	December 2010
Code Name	Barts XT	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective)	1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1120	1408
Texture Mapping Units	56	88
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	151 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	134400 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	50400 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	28800 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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 maximum fill rate.