Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units 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

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7790 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 51%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 76%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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