GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which has a clock speed of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 5047 (87%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (26%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 43% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (about 46%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50160 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (27%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.