GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which has a clock speed of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 5047 (87%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (26%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit (about 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50160 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6990, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (27%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.