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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 features a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which has GPU core speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory 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 Raster Operation Units.

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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

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a little bit faster than 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 quite a bit (about 79%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (approximately 59%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (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

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 590

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.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 7970 Radeon RX 590
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year January 2012 November 2018
Code Name Tahiti XT Polaris 30
Memory 3072 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 925 MHz 1469 MHz
Memory Speed 5500 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 264000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 118400 Mtexels/sec 211536 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 29600 Mpixels/sec 47008 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 12 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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 590

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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