Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 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 R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 2282 (38%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 84800 (47%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 64%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46400 (64%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.