Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (approximately 35%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a small bit (about 10%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (10%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 fill rate also depends on many 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.