Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which features a core clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be much (more or less 79%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93136 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17408 (59%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.