Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 57%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (100%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount 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 the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.