GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 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 HD 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
	Difference: 1480 (34%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 330 Watts (733%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 400% quicker than the GeForce GTX 860M in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (about 108%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 860M. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 82848 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTX 860M, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40368 (317%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.