Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 54016 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much (about 229%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49024 (229%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (20%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.