Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The Radeon HD 6790 makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 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 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 6790	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	April 2011	October 2010
Code Name	Barts LE	Barts XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	840 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1050 MHz	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	800	1120
Texture Mapping Units	40	56
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	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	134400 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33600 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	13440 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.