Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The Radeon HD 5970 uses a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6990 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 6990
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	November 2009	March 2011
Code Name	Hemlock XT	Antilles
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB (x2)	2048 MB (x2)
Core Speed	725 MHz (x2)	830 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	N/A MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective) (x2)	1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective) (x2)
Unified Shaders	1600 (x2)	1536 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	160 (x2)	96 (x2)
Render Output Units	64 (x2)	32 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit (x2)	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	294 watts	375 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	256000 MB/sec	320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	232000 Mtexels/sec	159360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	92800 Mpixels/sec	53120 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.