Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features a core clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, 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 should be a bit (approximately 5%) more effective at AF 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 much (more or less 53%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7990, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.