Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 129600 (426%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (approximately 2100%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67200 (2100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (about 700%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (700%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure 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 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.