Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 1911 (33%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 33% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 78%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69760 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (more or less 108%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27520 (108%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.