Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be 19% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (approximately 110%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (110%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (about 90%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (90%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.