Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 470, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 470 should be 32% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 will be quite a bit (more or less 68%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48128 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4032 (16%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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