Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 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 HD 7850		5200 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1730 (50%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 53%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29440 (53%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be just a bit (more or less 2%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7850, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 640 (2%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.