Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 5581 (260%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be much (approximately 167%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56000 (167%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (90%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.