Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which has GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 3425 (143%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 248 Watts (195%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 150% quicker than the Radeon HD 6850 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (approximately 328%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122160 (328%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28320 (114%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.