Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which has core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 187 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 108% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (about 134%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91360 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (more or less 95%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied 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 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.