Radeon HD 6950 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

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory perform a lot faster than 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 should be a lot (approximately 26%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 reach the max fill rate.