Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which has core speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 2580 (80%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (more or less 126%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.