Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 7295 (89%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (52%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 7970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 312000 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a lot (approximately 105%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 124800 (105%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (105%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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