Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 159%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 263%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.