Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has a clock speed of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2250 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 6 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, 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 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (134%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 is 79% faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 116544 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be a little bit (about 19%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is much (more or less 138%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.