Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs 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 7970		8225 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 494 (6%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 0 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 10% quicker than the Radeon HD 7950 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 32%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28800 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a little bit (about 16%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.