Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

The Radeon HD 5970 has a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 7950 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 7950
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	November 2009	January 2012
Code Name	Hemlock XT	Tahiti Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB (x2)	1536 MB
Core Speed	725 MHz (x2)	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (x2)	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	1600 (x2)	1792
Texture Mapping Units	160 (x2)	112
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	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	256000 MB/sec	240000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	232000 Mtexels/sec	89600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	92800 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.