Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 295X2, which comes with core clock speeds of 1018 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator 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 R9 295X2		21205 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 12980 (158%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 250 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 295X2 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 376000 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 is a lot (approximately 203%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 239936 (203%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 100704 (340%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a 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 called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.