Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a core clock frequency of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 9700 (167%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6990 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (more or less 53%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83840 (53%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a bit (more or less 14%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 6990, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.