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Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 features clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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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 is 50% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (approximately 40%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6970, but only just. (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

Radeon HD 6970

Radeon HD 7970

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.