Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs 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 as well as 88 TAUs 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% faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (about 267%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by far. (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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.