Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 100% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (approximately 126%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88960 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27520 (108%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.