Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which features a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 270		5943 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 2703 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a bit (approximately 2%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.