Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a core clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 590 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (approximately 136%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 121936 (136%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (approximately 84%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21408 (84%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.