GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		934298 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 670298 (254%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB is quite a bit (approximately 198%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		352800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 234400 (198%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should be much (more or less 377%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		141120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 111520 (377%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.