Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The Radeon HD 6950 has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a core clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.