Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 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 6990		5820 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 2950 (103%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 224 Watts (148%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 185600 (138%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (more or less 216%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108960 (216%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (more or less 84%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6870, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24320 (84%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.