Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs 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 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 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 4755 (137%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (about 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33920 (40%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a bit (about 5%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (5%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.