Compare any two graphics cards:

Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 comes with a core clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (approximately 40%) more effective at AF 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 small bit (more or less 5%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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

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Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	December 2010	January 2012
Code Name	Cayman XT	Tahiti XT
Memory	2048 MB	3072 MB
Core Speed	880 MHz	925 MHz
Memory Speed	5500 MHz	5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	250 watts
Bandwidth	176000 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	84480 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	28160 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	1536	2048
Texture Mapping Units	96	128
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	384-bit
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Transistors	2640 million	4313 million
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.