Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 6950		3240 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 1090 (51%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (more or less 110%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (90%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.