Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 224 Watts (148%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (more or less 205%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107160 (205%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29920 (129%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.