Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The Radeon HD 5970 has a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with GPU core speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6790 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 6790
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	November 2009	April 2011
Code Name	Hemlock XT	Barts LE
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1024 MB (x2)	1024 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz (x2)	840 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (x2)	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	1600 (x2)	800
Texture Mapping Units	160 (x2)	40
Render Output Units	64 (x2)	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit (x2)	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	294 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	256000 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	232000 Mtexels/sec	33600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	92800 Mpixels/sec	13440 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.