Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 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 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

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be just a bit faster than 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 will be much (about 28%) more effective 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, though not by far. (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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.