Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be 82% quicker than the Radeon R9 M280X overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 72000 (82%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (approximately 40%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the Radeon R9 M280X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (78%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.