Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 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 R9 280X		8886 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 3066 (53%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon R9 280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50560 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 95%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280X, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.