Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 480, which has GPU clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon RX 480		13349 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 5124 (62%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (29%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon RX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is much (more or less 36%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42880 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 will be a lot (more or less 21%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6240 (21%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.