Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which has clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 1% faster than the Radeon RX 590 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (more or less 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93136 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17408 (59%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.