Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: specs and benchmarks
Summary
AMD started Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition sales 22 June 2012 at a recommended price of $499 . This is a desktop graphics card based on a GCN 1.0 architecture and made with 28 nm manufacturing process. It is primarily aimed at gamer market. 3 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.5 GHz are supplied, and together with 384 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 288 GB/s.
Compatibility-wise, this is a dual-slot graphics card attached via PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 274 mm. One 6-pin and one 8-pin connectors are required, and power consumption is at 250 Watt.
Primary details
Some basic facts about Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: architecture, market segment, release date etc.
| Place in the ranking | not rated | |
| Place by popularity | not in top-100 | |
| Architecture | GCN 1.0 (2011−2020) | |
| GPU code name | Tahiti | |
| Market segment | Desktop | |
| Design | reference | |
| Release date | 22 June 2012 (12 years ago) | |
| Launch price (MSRP) | $499 | of 14,999 (Quadro Plex 7000) |
Detailed specifications
Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition's specs such as number of shaders, GPU base clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition's performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.
| Pipelines / CUDA cores | 2048 | of 21760 (GeForce RTX 5090) |
| Boost clock speed | 1050 MHz | of 3599 MHz (Radeon RX 7990 XTX) |
| Number of transistors | 4,313 million | of 208,000 million (B200 SXM 192 GB) |
| Manufacturing process technology | 28 nm | of 3 nm (Arc Graphics 140V) |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 250 Watt | of 2400 Watt (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem) |
| Texture fill rate | 134.4 | of 2,554 (Radeon Instinct MI300X) |
| Floating-point processing power | 4.301 TFLOPS | of 109.7 (GeForce RTX 5090) |
| ROPs | 32 | of 192 (Radeon RX 7900 XTX) |
| TMUs | 128 | of 1280 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT) |
Form factor & compatibility
This section provides details about the physical dimensions of Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and its compatibility with other computer components. This information is useful when selecting a computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards, it includes details about the interface and bus (for motherboard compatibility) and additional power connectors (for power supply compatibility).
| Bus support | PCIe 2.1 x16 | |
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x16 | |
| Length | 274 mm | |
| Width | 2-slot | |
| Supplementary power connectors | 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin |
VRAM capacity and type
Parameters of memory installed on Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors have no dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM instead.
| Memory type | GDDR5 | |
| Maximum RAM amount | 3 GB | of 294912 (Radeon Instinct MI325X) |
| Memory bus width | 384 Bit | of 8192 Bit (Radeon Instinct MI250X) |
| Memory clock speed | 1500 MHz | of 20000 (RTX 5000 Ada Generation Mobile) |
| Memory bandwidth | 288 GB/s | of 5,171 GB/s (Radeon Instinct MI300X) |
Connectivity and outputs
Types and number of video connectors present on Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference graphics cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model, while non-reference desktop models can (though not necessarily will) bear a different set of video ports.
| Display Connectors | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort | |
| Eyefinity | + | |
| HDMI | + |
Supported technologies
Technological solutions and APIs supported by Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. You'll probably need this information if you need some particular technology for your purposes.
| CrossFire | + | |
| FreeSync | + |
API compatibility
APIs supported by Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, sometimes including their particular versions.
| DirectX | DirectX® 11 | |
| Shader Model | 5.1 | |
| OpenGL | 4.6 | |
| OpenCL | 1.2 |
NVIDIA equivalent
According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB.
Similar GPUs
Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.
Recommended processors
These processors are most commonly used with Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition according to our statistics.
