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Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The Radeon HD 4790 has a GPU clock speed of 600 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should be 56% faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790 102400 MB/sec
Difference: 57600 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (more or less 267%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790 19200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 51200 (267%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (more or less 167%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4790, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790 9600 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 16000 (167%)

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.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 4790

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 6950

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 4790 Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year 2009 December 2010
Code Name RV790 Cayman Pro
Memory 512 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 600 MHz 800 MHz
Memory Speed 3200 MHz 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) (Unknown) watts 200 watts
Bandwidth 102400 MB/sec 160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 19200 Mtexels/sec 70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 9600 Mpixels/sec 25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 640(128x5) 1408
Texture Mapping Units 32 88
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 55 nm 40 nm
Transistors 959 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10.1 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 4790

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6950

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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