Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 1320 (61%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (about 151%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50880 (151%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (about 110%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6790, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14720 (110%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.