Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 480, which has a clock speed of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 7529 (129%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 480 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 should be just a bit (more or less 1%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 48%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (48%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.