Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 230%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 161600 (230%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 67200 (263%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 maximum fill rate.