Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a core clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7990		15520 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 7295 (89%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (52%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 312000 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (approximately 105%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 124800 (105%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (105%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.