Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 370 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should be 19% quicker than the Radeon HD 6870 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (about 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (40%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a small bit (about 13%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.