GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The GeForce GTX 470 uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 607 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 837 MHz on this card. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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.

GeForce GTX 470 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	GeForce GTX 470	Radeon HD 6990
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2010	March 2011
Code Name	GF100	Antilles
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1280 MB	2048 MB (x2)
Core Speed	607 MHz	830 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1215 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	837 MHz	1250 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	448	1536 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	56	96 (x2)
Render Output Units	40	32 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	215 watts	375 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	133920 MB/sec	320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33992 Mtexels/sec	159360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	24280 Mpixels/sec	53120 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.