Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 2950 (103%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 224 Watts (148%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 185600 (138%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (more or less 216%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108960 (216%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24320 (84%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.