Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Radeon HD 5970
Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 18 Nov 2009
Radeon HD 5970
Radeon HD 7970
Memory: 3072Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 22 Dec 2011
Radeon HD 7970

Summary

Synthetic performance index

  • Radeon HD 5970
    100%
  • Radeon HD 7970
    145%

Relative performance

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 5970

Based on an outdated architecture (ATI TeraScale), there are no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 7970

44 watts lower power draw. This might be a strong point if your current power supply is not enough to handle the Radeon HD 5970 .
This is a much newer product, it might have better long term support.
Around 45% higher average synthetic performance.
Supports Direct3D 12 Async Compute
Supports ReLive (allows game streaming/recording with minimum performance penalty)
Supports Mantle
Based on an outdated architecture (AMD GCN), there may be no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Radeon HD 7970

HWBench recommends Radeon HD 7970

The Radeon HD 7970 is the better performing card based on the synthetic benchmarks used (1 benchmarks).


Specifications

Core Configuration

Radeon HD 5970Radeon HD 7970
GPU NameHemlock (Hemlock XT)vsTahiti (Tahiti XT)
Fab Process40 nmvs28 nm
Die Size334 mm²vs352 mm²
Transistors2,154 millionvs4,313 million
Shaders1600vs2048
Compute Units20vs32
Core clock725 MHzvs925 MHz
ROPs32vs32
TMUs80vs128

Memory Configuration

Radeon HD 5970Radeon HD 7970
Memory TypeGDDR5vsGDDR5
Bus Width256 bit x2vs384 bit
Memory Speed1000 MHz
4000 MHz effective
vs1375 MHz
5500 MHz effective
Memory Size1024 Mbvs3072 Mb

Additional details

Radeon HD 5970Radeon HD 7970
TDP294 wattsvs250 watts
Release Date18 Nov 2009vs22 Dec 2011

Raw Performance comparison

Pixel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5970
    46.40 GP/s
  • Radeon HD 7970
    29.60 GP/s

GigaPixels - higher is better

Texel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5970
    116.00 GT/s
  • Radeon HD 7970
    118.00 GT/s

GigaTexels - higher is better

Memory bandwidth

  • Radeon HD 5970
    256.00 GB/s
  • Radeon HD 7970
    264.00 GB/s

GB/s - higher is better

Single precision performance

  • Radeon HD 5970
    4640.00 GFLOPs
  • Radeon HD 7970
    3789.00 GFLOPs

GFLOPs - higher is better

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark 11

  • Radeon HD 5970
    7410
  • Radeon HD 7970
    10760

Points (higher is better)