Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 380X		9519 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 6279 (194%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 380X should be 14% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be a lot (approximately 76%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53760 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X is much (about 21%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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 MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.