Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 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

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 32%) better at AF 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 will be just a bit (about 16%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and also will be able to handle higher screen 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.