Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs 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 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 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is quite a bit (approximately 28%) faster with regards to 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 running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.