Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 285, which features a clock speed of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 5260 (162%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (about 46%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32416 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (15%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.