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Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 200 Watts
Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (more or less 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 18200 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 2400 (10%)

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

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6950

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 30, 2009 December 2010
Code Name Cypress PRO Cayman Pro
Memory 1024 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 725 MHz 800 MHz
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 200 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 52200 Mtexels/sec 70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23200 Mpixels/sec 25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1440(288x5) 1408
Texture Mapping Units 72 88
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 2154 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6950

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Comments

One Response to “Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6950”
tomas says:

Interesting article, thanks a lot!

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