Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 7970		8225 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 6075 (283%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 96% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 129600 (96%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (approximately 252%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84800 (252%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (more or less 120%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16160 (120%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.