Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 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 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 1090 (34%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 26%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (more or less 60%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7790, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (60%)

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 transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 outputting the pixels (image) to 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.