Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features GPU core speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 7850		5200 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1730 (50%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (more or less 53%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29440 (53%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a little bit (more or less 2%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7850, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 640 (2%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.