Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 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 6870		2870 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 720 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (about 50%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be quite a bit (approximately 114%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6790, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (114%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.