Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which features a GPU core clock speed of 970 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 380 2G should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G will be a lot (approximately 54%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38240 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5440 (21%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.