Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is 4% quicker than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a bit (approximately 4%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount of texture units of the card 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 chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.