Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5700

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5700, which has GPU clock speed of 1465 MHz, and 8096 MB of GDDR6 memory running at 1750 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5700		180 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5700 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700		458752 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 194752 (74%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 will be a lot (more or less 78%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700		210960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 92560 (78%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5700 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700		93760 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64160 (217%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 most 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.