Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be quite a bit (about 79%) faster with regards to texture 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 using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.