Compare any two graphics cards:

Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform much 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 much (approximately 40%) faster with regards to texture 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 should be a little bit (about 5%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (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

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	December 2010	January 2012
Code Name	Cayman XT	Tahiti XT
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	3072 MB
Core Speed	880 MHz	925 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1536	2048
Texture Mapping Units	96	128
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	176000 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	84480 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	28160 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.