Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Radeon HD 5970 has a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which features GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	November 2009	January 2012
Code Name	Hemlock XT	Tahiti XT
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB (x2)	3072 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz (x2)	925 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective) (x2)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1600 (x2)	2048
Texture Mapping Units	160 (x2)	128
Render Output Units	64 (x2)	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit (x2)	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	294 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	256000 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	232000 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	92800 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.