Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU core speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (more or less 340%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65280 (340%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (about 193%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (193%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.