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AMD Radeon HD 6930

AMD Radeon HD 6930 in 2025: Nostalgia or Practicality?

Analyzing an Outdated Legend for Modern Tasks

Architecture and Key Features: A Legacy of the Past

The AMD Radeon HD 6930, released in December 2011, is built on the TeraScale 2 (VLIW4) architecture. This is the second generation of TeraScale technology that replaced the outdated VLIW5. The card was manufactured using a 40nm process technology, which was standard for its time but now appears archaic compared to modern 5nm chips.

Key Features:

- 1120 stream processors and texturing at 69.6 GT/s.

- Support for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.2 — relevant at the time of release but outdated by 2025.

- Lacks modern technologies such as FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), Ray Tracing, or DLSS. Even basic upscaling algorithms are unavailable for the HD 6930.

The card was aimed at the budget segment, offering a balance between price and performance, but today its capabilities are limited, even for office tasks.

Memory: A Modest Resource for Simple Tasks

The HD 6930 came equipped with 1GB GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit bus. Its bandwidth reached 153.6 GB/s — a decent figure for 2011, but critically insufficient for modern games and applications.

What does this mean in 2025?

- 1GB VRAM is catastrophically low even for browser-based games. For example, Chrome with 10 tabs can consume a significant portion of the buffer.

- In games like Counter-Strike 2 or Fortnite (on minimal settings), lag may occur due to memory overflow.

Gaming Performance: Modest Results Even in HD

In 2025, the HD 6930 is a card suitable for retro gaming or indie projects. Examples of FPS (at 1080p, low settings):

- GTA V: 25-30 FPS (with frequent drops).

- Dota 2: 40-50 FPS.

- Minecraft (without shaders): 60+ FPS.

Supported Resolutions:

- 1080p — the only viable option.

- 1440p and 4K — unrealistic even for older games.

Ray tracing is absent at the hardware level, and software emulation (e.g., Proton) would drop FPS down to a slideshow.

Professional Tasks: Time to Say "No"

The HD 6930 is suitable for work only in exceptional cases:

- Video Editing: Basic editing in DaVinci Resolve (without effects) is possible, but rendering will take 5-10 times longer than on modern GPUs.

- 3D Modeling: Blender with OpenCL will show 10-15% of the rendering speed relative to the Radeon RX 6600.

- Scientific Calculations: Support for OpenCL 1.2 is obsolete for modern libraries.

The card is incompatible with the Vulkan 1.3 API and DirectX 12 Ultimate, which rules it out for professional use.

Power Consumption and Heat Generation: Unexpected Demands

Despite its age, the HD 6930 remains "power-hungry":

- TDP: 190W — similar to some modern mid-range cards (like the RTX 4060, which has a TDP of 115W).

- Recommendations:

- A power supply of at least 500W (considering the age of the PSU and degradation of components).

- Requires 2 slots in the case for ventilation. Enclosed cases will lead to overheating (temperatures can reach 90°C).

Tip: If you're still using the HD 6930, replace the thermal paste and install case fans for intake and exhaust.

Comparison with Competitors: A Battle of the Past

In its generation, the HD 6930 competed with:

- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Comparable performance, but Nvidia has better driver optimization.

- AMD Radeon HD 6950: A more powerful alternative (+10-15% FPS) for a slightly higher cost.

In 2025, all of these models have equally aged. For comparison:

- The new Radeon RX 6400 ($150) is 3-4 times faster than the HD 6930 with a TDP of 53W.

Practical Tips: How to Maximize Performance

1. Power Supply: 500W with an 80+ Bronze certification. Avoid cheap, unknown brands.

2. Compatibility:

- Motherboard with PCIe 2.0 x16 (compatible with PCIe 3.0/4.0, but with no speed boost).

- UEFI BIOS support is critical for operation in Windows 11.

3. Drivers: The latest version is Adrenalin 15.7.1 (2015). For Linux, use the open-source amdgpu driver, but expect bugs.

Pros and Cons: Is It Worth It?

Pros:

- Secondary market price: $20-30.

- Low requirements for older games (e.g., Skyrim or Mass Effect 3).

- Simplicity in overclocking (if cooling headroom is available).

Cons:

- No support for modern APIs and technologies.

- High power consumption.

- Risk of failure due to age (capacitors, thermal interface).

Final Conclusion: Who is the HD 6930 for in 2025?

This graphics card is an option for:

1. Retro PC enthusiasts assembling systems from the 2010s.

2. A temporary solution in case of the main card's failure (e.g., while waiting for a new one to arrive).

3. Office tasks — if no graphics work or browser applications are needed.

Why you shouldn't buy an HD 6930: Even budget-friendly new GPUs (like the Intel Arc A380 for $120) offer support for modern standards, low power consumption, and warranties.

Conclusion: The AMD Radeon HD 6930 is a monument of its era, but not a practical choice today. Its place is in a museum or niche scenarios, not in everyday use. If your budget is limited to $50, you would be better off looking for a used GTX 1050 Ti or RX 570 — they are still relevant.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

December 2011

Model Name

Radeon HD 6930

Generation

Northern Islands

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

2,640 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

TeraScale 3

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1024MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1200MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

153.6 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

24.00 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

60.00 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

480.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.882 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1280

L1 Cache

8 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

186W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.2

OpenGL

4.4

DirectX

11.2 (11_0)

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.0

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

450W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.882 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon HD 6870

1.976 +5%

Quadro P1000

1.932 +2.7%

Radeon HD 6930

1.882

Quadro M2000

1.822 -3.2%

GeForce GTX 1630

1.791 -4.8%