Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be 51% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 54016 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (more or less 229%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49024 (229%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a bit (approximately 20%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (20%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.