Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. 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		200 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 230%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 263%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.