Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of 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 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (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%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 263%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.