GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features core speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units 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 HD 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 470		2937 points
	Difference: 2883 (98%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (74%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 470 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 186080 (139%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (approximately 369%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 125368 (369%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28840 (119%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.