Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, 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 should be much (approximately 468%) more effective at texture 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 resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.