Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, 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 7870		6230 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 2760 (80%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a little bit (approximately 6%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4480 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be just a bit (approximately 14%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.