Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has core speeds of 2200 MHz on the GPU, and 2250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 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 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 268 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 172544 (117%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a little bit (approximately 13%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be a lot (approximately 33%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6990, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (33%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.