Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with core clock speeds of 918 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units 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 R9 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 5030 (145%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (more or less 22%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18336 (22%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a little bit (approximately 4%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1216 (4%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.