Radeon HD 4350 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 228 Watts (1036%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4350 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 168000 (2100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 1737%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79880 (1737%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (more or less 1124%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4350, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25860 (1124%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.