Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which has clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

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

The Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (approximately 102%) better at texture filtering 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, and very much so. (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 (counted in 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 the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.