ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II vs ATI Radeon HD 6950

There are two factors that influence the maximum pixel fillrate. They are graphics clock rate and the number of ROPs. The Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II has a small advantage here, as it operates at higher frequency, and both GPUs have the same number of Raster Operations Pipelines. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased performance, unless the graphics card is limited by something else, such as texture fillrate, memory bandwidth or CPU speed.

Even though its graphics frequency is lower, the Radeon HD 6950 comes with more TMUs, resulting in higher texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the graphics card can apply more textures and/or utilize more sophisticated 3D effects for each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, illustrates how fast the GPU is at executing programs, that use single-precision floating point numbers. As a rule, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores run at, and the more cores / processors the graphics unit has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The Radeon HD 6950 card is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. Since games do not use double-precision arithmetics, this characteristic is unimportant to games performance. The Radeon HD 6950 has an edge here.

To speed up processing, the cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics unit to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the ASUS Radeon R7 265 DirectCU II comes with higher clocked memory. As a consequence, it has higher memory bandwidth.