Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 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 6870		2870 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 720 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 114%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (114%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.