Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5600

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5600, which has clock speeds of 1375 MHz on the GPU, and 12000 MHz on the 6144 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.