Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which has a clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1425 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, 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 380 4G		8837 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 5367 (155%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 380 4G, in theory, should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be quite a bit (more or less 29%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24160 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2880 (10%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.