FirePro D500 vs Radeon HD 6950

Place in the ranking	559	426
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	1.11	no data
Power efficiency	2.36	2.76
Architecture	TeraScale 3 (2010−2013)	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)
GPU code name	Cayman	Tahiti
Market segment	Desktop	Workstation
Design	reference	no data
Release date	14 December 2010 (13 years ago)	18 January 2014 (10 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$299	no data

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1408	1536
Core clock speed	no data	725 MHz
Boost clock speed	800 MHz	no data
Number of transistors	2,640 million	4,313 million
Manufacturing process technology	40 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	500 Watt	274 Watt
Texture fill rate	70.40	69.60
Floating-point processing power	2.253 TFLOPS	2.227 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	32
TMUs	88	96

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Bus support	PCIe 2.0 x16	no data
Interface	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	267 mm	279 mm
Width	2-slot	2-slot
Supplementary power connectors	2x 6-pin	no data

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB	3 GB
Memory bus width	256 Bit	384 Bit
Memory clock speed	1250 MHz	1270 MHz
Memory bandwidth	no data	243.8 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors	2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort	6x mini-DisplayPort, 1x SDI
Eyefinity	+	-
HDMI	+	-

Supported technologies

Supported technological solutions. This information will prove useful if you need some particular technology for your purposes.

CrossFire

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	DirectX® 11	12 (11_1)
Shader Model	5.0	5.1
OpenGL	4.4	4.6
OpenCL	1.2	1.2
Vulkan	-	1.2.131

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	6.76	10.83
Recency	14 December 2010	18 January 2014
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB	3 GB
Chip lithography	40 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	500 Watt	274 Watt

FirePro D500 has a 60.2% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 3 years, a 50% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 42.9% more advanced lithography process, and 82.5% lower power consumption.

The FirePro D500 is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon HD 6950 in performance tests.

Be aware that Radeon HD 6950 is a desktop card while FirePro D500 is a workstation one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.