Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6900 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which comes with a core clock speed of 1825 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It features 5120 SPUs, 320 Texture Address Units, and 128 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon RX 6900 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6900 XT should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 332288 (173%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 558%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		584000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 495200 (558%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT will be much (about 689%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 204000 (689%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.