Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (more or less 340%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65280 (340%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (193%)

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 the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.