Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units 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 theoretically be a lot superior to 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 should be a lot (about 105%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 105%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.