Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which has core clock speeds of 1257 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 5405 (66%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		28 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a bit better than the Radeon RX 580 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 should be much (about 53%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62608 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10624 (36%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.