Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 1911 (33%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (more or less 78%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69760 (78%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27520 (108%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.