Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which features a GPU core clock speed of 2200 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory running at 2250 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 Stream Processors, 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 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 93 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 12544 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be quite a bit (more or less 100%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70400 (100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be a lot (about 175%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6950, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44800 (175%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.