Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 550, which has core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 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 HD 7970		8225 points
Radeon RX 550		3507 points
	Difference: 4718 (135%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 149312 (130%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 236%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83200 (236%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (68%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

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