Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 7529 (129%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 22% faster than the Radeon RX 480 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 will be a little bit (approximately 1%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (48%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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