Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses 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 particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 5355 (187%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 129600 (96%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 135%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68000 (135%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 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. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.