Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which features a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 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 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 1460 (51%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be just a bit (approximately 11%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (11%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be a lot (more or less 80%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7790, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.