Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.