Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 320000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a little bit (about 5%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 53%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7990, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (53%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.