Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 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 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 845 (35%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 73 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (approximately 89%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33200 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses 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 per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.