Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon R9 285 should be just a bit faster than 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 will be a lot (more or less 46%) better 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

The Radeon R9 285 is a little bit (approximately 15%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.