Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is quite a bit (about 102%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (102%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a 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 speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.