Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 580, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1257 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon RX 580		13630 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 5899 (76%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		315 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 80 (34%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		28 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 580 will be 9% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 should be much (approximately 102%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91408 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14624 (57%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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 reach the max fill rate.