Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1257 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 RX 580		13630 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 5899 (76%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		315 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 80 (34%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		28 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 580 is 9% quicker than the Radeon HD 7950 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 will be quite a bit (approximately 102%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91408 (102%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 will be a lot (more or less 57%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14624 (57%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.