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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500, which has a core clock frequency of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 14000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 34624 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be a lot (approximately 24%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28560 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be much (approximately 81%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (81%)

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 5500

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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 5500
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	January 2012	October 2019
Code Name	Tahiti XT	Navi 14 XT
Memory	3072 MB	4096 MB
Core Speed	925 MHz	1670 MHz
Memory Speed	5500 MHz	28000 GB/s
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	150 watts
Bandwidth	264000 MB/sec	229376 MB/sec
Texel Rate	118400 Mtexels/sec	146960 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29600 Mpixels/sec	53440 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	2048	1408
Texture Mapping Units	128	88
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR6
Bus Width	384-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	7 nm
Transistors	4313 million	6400 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

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