Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 comes with a core clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which features clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 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.

Radeon HD 6970 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 6970	Radeon HD 6990
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	December 2010	March 2011
Code Name	Cayman XT	Antilles
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB (x2)
Core Speed	880 MHz	830 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1375 MHz	1250 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	1536	1536 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	96	96 (x2)
Render Output Units	32	32 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	375 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	176000 MB/sec	320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	84480 Mtexels/sec	159360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	28160 Mpixels/sec	53120 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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