Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 320000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a little bit (about 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 53%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7990, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (53%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.