Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 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 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 12650 (441%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 224 Watts (148%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 is 329% faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 441600 (329%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (more or less 383%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 192800 (383%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (111%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.