Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 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.

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Radeon RX 480 4GB		25 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (4%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB will be a little bit (approximately 1%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 48%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 chip could possibly write to the local memory per 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.