Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (more or less 57%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (100%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.