Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 46%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72640 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6990, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39680 (75%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.