Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1925 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a speed of 2250 MHz on this card. It features 5120 SPUs as well as 320 Texture Address Units and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (81%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 6950 XT should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		589824 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 397824 (207%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT will be a lot (about 594%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 527200 (594%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6950 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (732%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.