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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 has a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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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 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 little bit superior to 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 will be quite a bit (approximately 53%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is a better choice, and very much so. (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

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 580

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 7970 Radeon RX 580
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year January 2012 April 2017
Code Name Tahiti XT Polaris 20
Memory 3072 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 925 MHz 1257 MHz
Memory Speed 5500 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 185 watts
Bandwidth 264000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 118400 Mtexels/sec 181008 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 29600 Mpixels/sec 40224 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 2048 2304
Texture Mapping Units 128 144
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 14 nm
Transistors 4313 million 5700 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.1 DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.2 OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 580

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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