Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (more or less 26%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a small bit (more or less 16%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.