Radeon HD 6950 2GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 285, which has a GPU core clock speed of 918 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a lot (more or less 46%) better at AF 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

The Radeon R9 285 should be just a bit (approximately 15%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface 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 better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

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