Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs 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 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (approximately 134%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by far. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of 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.