Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 12280 (379%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 416000 (260%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is quite a bit (more or less 245%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 172800 (245%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is much (about 138%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (138%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.