GeForce RTX 3090 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
GeForce RTX 3090		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3090 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		958668 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 694668 (263%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3090 is a lot (approximately 286%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		457560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 339160 (286%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3090 will be a lot (more or less 428%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		156240 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 126640 (428%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.