Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

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

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 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 5830 (243%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 123 Watts (97%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 136000 (106%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (more or less 218%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81200 (218%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is just a bit (approximately 19%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (19%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.