Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (about 57%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (57%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (100%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.