Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which makes use of a 6 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 2200 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a speed of 2250 MHz on this card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be much better than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 44544 (30%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be quite a bit (more or less 59%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52000 (59%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be a lot (more or less 138%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40800 (138%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.