AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition vs MSI Radeon HD 7970 OC (R7970-2PMD3G5/OC)

 

 

Single Precision performance is useful for figuring out card's maximum speed in applications, that process mainly single-precision floating point data. The performance is expressed in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second. All single-precision calculations are performed by stream processors or CUDA cores, thus the more cores / processors the GPU has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card is a bit faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. This characteristic is unimportant to games performance because games do not use double-precision arithmetics. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPU has a little advantage here.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on a few components, such as memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition can be attributed to higher clocked memory.