Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be just a bit (about 2%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.