Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 159%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 142400 (159%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 67200 (263%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.