Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 7850		5200 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 1960 (60%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (approximately 28%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (8%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 processed in a second.

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