Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features a clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 187 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (about 134%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91360 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (more or less 95%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5870, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.