Radeon HD 7970M vs RX 480 Mobile

Primary details

GPU architecture, market segment, value for money and other general parameters compared.

Place in the rankingnot rated472
Place by popularitynot in top-100not in top-100
Power efficiencyno data6.41
ArchitectureGCN 4.0 (2016−2020)GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)
GPU code nameEllesmereWimbledon
Market segmentLaptopLaptop
Release date4 August 2016 (8 years ago)24 April 2012 (12 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)$450 no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores23041280
Core clock speed1000 MHz850 MHz
Boost clock speed1077 MHzno data
Number of transistors5,700 million2,800 million
Manufacturing process technology14 nm28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)100 Watt100 Watt
Texture fill rate155.168.00
Floating-point processing power4.963 TFLOPS2.176 TFLOPS
ROPs3232
TMUs14480

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Laptop sizelargelarge
InterfaceMXM-B (3.0)MXM-B (3.0)
Supplementary power connectorsno dataNone

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory typeGDDR5GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount8 GB2 GB
Memory bus width256 Bit256 Bit
Memory clock speed2000 MHz1200 MHz
Memory bandwidth256.0 GB/s153.6 GB/s
Shared memory--

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display ConnectorsNo outputsNo outputs

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX12 (12_0)12 (11_1)
Shader Model6.45.1
OpenGL4.64.6
OpenCL2.01.2
Vulkan1.2.1311.2.131

Pros & cons summary


Recency 4 August 2016 24 April 2012
Maximum RAM amount 8 GB 2 GB
Chip lithography 14 nm 28 nm

RX 480 Mobile has an age advantage of 4 years, a 300% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 100% more advanced lithography process.

We couldn't decide between Radeon RX 480 Mobile and Radeon HD 7970M. We've got no test results to judge.


Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.

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AMD Radeon RX 480 Mobile
Radeon RX 480 Mobile
AMD Radeon HD 7970M
Radeon HD 7970M

Comparisons with similar GPUs

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Community ratings

Here you can see the user ratings of the compared graphics cards, as well as rate them yourself.


3.3 20 votes

Rate Radeon RX 480 Mobile on a scale of 1 to 5:

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4.2 43 votes

Rate Radeon HD 7970M on a scale of 1 to 5:

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Questions & comments

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