Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in general, because of its greater data rate. (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 (more or less 35%) better at AF 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 is a lot (more or less 79%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also should be able to handle higher screen 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past 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 memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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 max fill rate.