Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Radeon HD 7850 comes with a core clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 7850 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 7850	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	March 2012	January 2012
Code Name	Pitcairn Pro	Tahiti XT
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	3072 MB
Core Speed	860 MHz	925 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1024	2048
Texture Mapping Units	64	128
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	130 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	55040 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27520 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.