Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The Radeon HD 6790 makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 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 6790 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 6790	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	April 2011	December 2010
Code Name	Barts LE	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	840 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1050 MHz	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	800	1408
Texture Mapping Units	40	88
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	134400 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33600 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	13440 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of 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 better this number, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.