Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 620 (12%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (85%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 245 Watts (188%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 108% quicker than the Radeon HD 7850 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (approximately 190%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104320 (190%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (93%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.