Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 295X2, which has a clock speed of 1018 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2816 SPUs, 176 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 295X2		21205 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 15385 (264%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 295X2 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 6990 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 320000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 is a lot (approximately 125%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 198976 (125%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 77184 (145%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.