Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (approximately 468%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58000 (468%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (106%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 a second.

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