Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 60% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 230%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 161600 (230%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 67200 (263%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.