Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 320000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a small bit (approximately 5%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (53%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.