Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 2405 (41%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (approximately 35%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40960 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 79%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23520 (79%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.