Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 314 Watts (515%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 400% quicker than the Radeon HD 5670 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 928%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 143860 (928%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46920 (757%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.