Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon RX Vega 56

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which comes with a clock frequency of 1156 MHz and a HBM2 memory speed of 1600 MHz. It also features a 2048-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It features 3584 SPUs, 224 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon RX Vega 56		210 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX Vega 56 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		419430 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 179430 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 should be much (approximately 189%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		258944 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 169344 (189%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 will be quite a bit (about 189%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		73984 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48384 (189%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.