Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 R9 270X		6590 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 3350 (103%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270X should be 12% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be a little bit (about 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (25%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.