Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific model. 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 the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (more or less 22%) faster with regards to texture filtering 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 is just a bit (more or less 4%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.