Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units 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 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 12050 (347%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 400000 (227%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 188%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 158720 (188%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is quite a bit (about 116%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32640 (116%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.