Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 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 6990		5820 points
Radeon HD 7790		4330 points
	Difference: 1490 (34%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 290 Watts (341%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 185%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103360 (185%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (more or less 232%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7790, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37120 (232%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 are processed in one second. This number 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.