Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 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 in general, 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 is a small bit (approximately 11%) more effective at AF 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 superior to the Radeon HD 7790, 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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.