Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB uses a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features GPU core speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 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 6950 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6990 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 6950 2GB	Radeon HD 6990
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	December 2010	March 2011
Code Name	Cayman Pro	Antilles
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB (x2)
Core Speed	800 MHz	830 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1250 MHz	1250 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	1408	1536 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	88	96 (x2)
Render Output Units	32	32 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	200 watts	375 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	160000 MB/sec	320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	70400 Mtexels/sec	159360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	25600 Mpixels/sec	53120 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.