Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 133504 (504%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (approximately 559%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59712 (559%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14912 (140%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.