Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which has GPU clock speed of 1925 MHz, and 16384 MB of GDDR6 memory running at 2250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 5120 Stream Processors, 320 TAUs, and 128 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6950 XT should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		589824 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 349824 (146%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT should be quite a bit (more or less 489%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 511504 (489%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT should be much (approximately 725%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 216544 (725%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.