Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which features core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 380 4G is 14% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be quite a bit (more or less 54%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38240 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be a lot (more or less 21%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 maximum fill rate.