Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a core clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 6970		3470 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 230 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a little bit (about 20%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.