Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be 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

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 53%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7990, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.