Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which comes with a core clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2816 SPUs, 176 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 R9 390X 8G		13555 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 7735 (133%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 390X 8G		32 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should be 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6990 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be just a bit (more or less 16%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25440 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 6990, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.