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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5600

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5600, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1375 MHz. The GDDR6 memory runs at a frequency of 12000 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5600		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5600 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5600		294912 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 30912 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5600 should be much (approximately 49%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5600		176000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5600 will be much (approximately 197%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5600		88000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 58400 (197%)

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

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Radeon RX 5600

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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 5600
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	January 2012	January 2020
Code Name	Tahiti XT	Navi 10 XE
Memory	3072 MB	6144 MB
Core Speed	925 MHz	1375 MHz
Memory Speed	5500 MHz	24000 GB/s
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	150 watts
Bandwidth	264000 MB/sec	294912 MB/sec
Texel Rate	118400 Mtexels/sec	176000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29600 Mpixels/sec	88000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	2048	2048
Texture Mapping Units	128	128
Render Output Units	32	64
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR6
Bus Width	384-bit	192-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	7 nm
Transistors	4313 million	10300 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 ×16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 12
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.6

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many 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.

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