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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a bit faster than 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 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

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 590

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 7970 Radeon RX 590
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year January 2012 November 2018
Code Name Tahiti XT Polaris 30
Memory 3072 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 925 MHz 1469 MHz
Memory Speed 5500 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 264000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 118400 Mtexels/sec 211536 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 29600 Mpixels/sec 47008 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 2048 2304
Texture Mapping Units 128 144
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 12 nm
Transistors 4313 million 5700 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.1 DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.2 OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 590

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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