Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 40% quicker than the Radeon HD 7790 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a small bit (approximately 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.