Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency 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 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 159%) faster with regards to 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 a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.