Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 56% quicker than the Radeon HD 4790 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (more or less 267%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51200 (267%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (more or less 167%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (167%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.