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Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 features a GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory is set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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 7870 XT 6390 points
Radeon HD 6970 3470 points
Difference: 2920 (84%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT 185 Watts
Radeon HD 6970 250 Watts
Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT 192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970 176000 MB/sec
Difference: 16000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be a bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT 88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970 84480 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 4320 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 6970, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT 29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970 28160 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 1440 (5%)

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

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Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7870 XT

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 6970 Radeon HD 7870 XT
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year December 2010 November 2012
Code Name Cayman XT Tahiti LE
Memory 2048 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 880 MHz 925 MHz
Memory Speed 5500 MHz 6000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 185 watts
Bandwidth 176000 MB/sec 192000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 84480 Mtexels/sec 88800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 28160 Mpixels/sec 29600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1536 1536
Texture Mapping Units 96 96
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2640 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7870 XT

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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