Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R7 370 2G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 370 2G, which comes with a core clock frequency of 975 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 2G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 370 2G will be 12% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a bit (more or less 13%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 370 2G. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 2G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 370 2G is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (22%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.