Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 15872 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (about 167%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (167%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be just a bit (more or less 3%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.