Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 is 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (approximately 57%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (57%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (100%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.