Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 6650 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which has core clock speeds of 2055 MHz on the GPU, and 2190 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		176 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X will be 11% faster than the Radeon RX 6650 XT in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6650 XT		287072 MB/sec
	Difference: 32928 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should be a lot (more or less 87%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		263040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122240 (87%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6650 XT is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		131520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80320 (157%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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