Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which features a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 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 7790		4330 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 860 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (more or less 51%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28480 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (76%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.