Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 267 Watts (247%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5770 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 369%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 125360 (369%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 5770, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39520 (291%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.