Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX Vega 56

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1156 MHz, and 8192 MB of HBM2 RAM running at 1600 MHz through a 2048-bit bus. It also features 3584 Stream Processors, 224 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

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 Vega 56		21011 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 12786 (155%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX Vega 56		210 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX Vega 56 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		419430 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 155430 (59%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 is much (more or less 119%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		258944 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 140544 (119%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX Vega 56 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		73984 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44384 (150%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.