Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 7970		8225 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 1835 (29%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 is 38% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 72000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 33%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have the exact same pixel fill rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.