Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 comes with a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	September 30, 2009	December 2010
Code Name	Cypress PRO	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	1440(288x5)	1408
Texture Mapping Units	72	88
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	151 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	52200 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	23200 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.