Radeon HD 7990 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has GPU clock speed of 2200 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM running at 2250 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 1024 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 268 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be much better than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 428544 (291%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be quite a bit (more or less 73%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 102400 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (16%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.