Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 is 136% faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 152000 (136%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 94%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57360 (94%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 70%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (70%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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