Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units 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 HD 6950		3240 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 845 (35%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 73 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (about 89%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33200 (89%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a little bit (approximately 3%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6850, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.