Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5870 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (more or less 102%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (102%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.