Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 285 is 10% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be quite a bit (about 46%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32416 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (15%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.