Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 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 7870		6230 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 4080 (190%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (approximately 138%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46400 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (138%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 chip can possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.