Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which uses a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be much (about 79%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93136 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17408 (59%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 max fill rate.