Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which features clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 187 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 108% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (about 134%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91360 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few 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.