Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 HD 6970		3470 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 230 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is just a bit (approximately 20%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (10%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.